


The Immortal Realm of Barbelo

by joisbishmyoga



Series: The Immortal Realm of Barbelo [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: ALL THE SPOILERS, Abuse, Bad Ending, Child Abuse, Disturbing Themes, Eating Disorder, Gore, If you handled the game ok you'll probably be fine, M/M, Poverty, Redemption, Spoilers, You can pry these headcanons from my cold dead zombie hands and then I will eat your brains, disturbing imagery, metaphorical prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-11-23 12:22:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11402325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joisbishmyoga/pseuds/joisbishmyoga
Summary: No.  A child's voice, soft and desperate.  There is one last possibility... you mustn't give in!But what else could he do?Something chuckled softly, deep in his heart, and suddenly his mask burned.  Akechi clutched at it, metal and glass melting between his fingers, rolling molten into his throat to choke back his scream.Well, now.  This is familiar.





	1. Chapter 1

_So, this is what Kurusu saw before he died._  
  
The exhaustion of Akechi's spell power rasped in the cradle of his skull, sticky and thirsty just above the nape of his neck.  It was the only part of him that didn't burn, stinging cuts and the molasses drag of muscles that wanted nothing more than for something else to take their own weight, padding optional.  But even if he could lift his gun -- could he?  It would take every last dreg of energy he had left -- he'd run out of bullets on the thing's companion Shadows, Shadows that he'd sent on a frenzy, only for them to not find enough substance in it to recognize it as the target, instead of himself.  
  
That the shell of a thing had Akechi's face...  
  
It was only fitting, wasn't it.  
  
It raised its own gun -- real, too real, the scent of cordite drifting from its muzzle the only scent in this bland hallway other than Akechi's blood -- and its eyes lit up faintly.  "You are going to die for Lord Shido's world before me..." it mused.  "I'm honestly jealous."  
  
Jealous?  _Jealous?_ Akechi had torn out his heart, ripped the shining hero of his childhood from the stain of being Loki, murdered and mind-raped and betrayed on Shido's orders, all just to... die early, a failure.  
  
 _No_.  A child's voice, soft and desperate.  _There is one last possibility... you mustn't give in!_  
  
But what else could he do?  
  
Something chuckled softly, deep in his heart, and suddenly his mask burned.  Akechi clutched at it, metal and glass melting between his fingers, rolling molten into his throat to choke back his scream.  
  
 _Well, now.  This is familiar._  
  
Akechi could hear the new voice clearly, hollow and echoing and undeniably male, over and despite Akechi's screams coughing through liquid fire.  Despite the pounding of his heart, rising in his ears and chest.  
  
 _One who has fought for his vision of justice, only to fall at the eleventh hour.  Are you willing to let all your work be in vain?_  
  
No.  Not after he'd-- not after what he did.  How he'd sacrificed everything.  
  
 _Not quite everything_ , the echoing voice replied.    
  
What else could he have, though?  
  
 _I think I'll let you find that out.  All you need to do... is be willing to try.  Vow to me._  
  
Chains buzzed through his veins, rattling under his skin, in his palms where they were pressed to the Shadow-stained carpet and the smooth mask melting into his cheek and across one eye.  
  
 _Thou who will not let this one last chance slip through his fingers!  Call upon my name, and release thy guilt!_  
  
Guilt.  
  
Akechi's heart stopped in his throat.  
  
That voice.  It couldn't be.  It couldn't.  People didn't--!  
  
The pain vanished as if it had never been, leaving only the dragging ache of the weariness Akechi'd had before, but he couldn't speak.  Couldn't breathe.  Could only stare at the darkened swirl of Shadow residue, at the stark black gloves that had lost their claws... could only raise his head to meet his cognitive double's blank stare as it raised a perfect copy of his own gun to his face.  
  
"You should be grateful," it reminded him.  
  
 _Say. my. name!_  
  
The whisper came all but unbidden.  "Akira."  
  
The world erupted in blue fire.  
  
Akechi could only stare at the black chains streaming out of his hands, sucking in swathes of the fire to burn a deep sapphire blue, as the presence materialized like a great bird of prey, mantling over him.  He couldn't look.  _Couldn't_ , even as tears of pain streamed from his eyes and defiance surged in his throat.  
  
"What's this?" the cognitive sneered.  "Yet another try...?  But your last two Personae worked so _well_ against me."  
  
"We need only one move."  Akechi could hear Joker's glee, all but see the knowing grin as the familiar alien sensation of teal fizz bubbled up in Akechi's stomach. "Diarama."  
  
What--?!  
  
The cognitive laughed, mad and overjoyed.  "What an idiot!"  And fired.  
  
With a glassy ting, the bullet rebounded.  
  
"And Repel Gun," Akira finished.  
  
The one thing he'd wished Akira could've had in reality.  Just one skill... just _one_ , one standing between his orders and his heart... and what was a Persona but an extreme manifestation of a cognitive world.  Of course this Persona had it.  
  
The chains continued to stream through Akechi's hands.  Blue and black against the bloodstained carpet, coiling endlessly where he curled over them.  If he just watched until they faded, he wouldn't have to look into the face of his greatest crime.  
  
One pointed boot poked at Akechi's side.  "Get up."  
  
The battle was over.  Why wasn't it going _away?_  
  
"You owe me.  Get _up_."  
  
Akechi managed not to wince, but that was the extent of his willpower.  He couldn't deny... this Persona... the decency of looking it in the face.  Slowly, he pushed himself up, turning as he got his feet under him.  
  
The tips of those sharp boots hovered a handspan above the ground, elegant as the base of a spinning top.  Akechi dragged his eyes up the loose cut of leather trousers, the floating swirl of the three-tailed coat, and caught on the high collar of the waistcoat at eye level.  
  
"You need to get out of here," it said, this time with exactly Joker's unruffled, naturally commanding tone.  "Summon me again outside."  
  
And then, finally, in a burst of fire and fading chains, it vanished.  Its urgency to leave, though, only settled itself into the back of Akechi's mind, with flickering notions of _security rising_ in the green haze at the edges of Akechi's vision, the laserpoint sensation of _Shadows-here, -here_ , and - _here_ , a whisper of _something_ streaking golden value into an unfortunate Daruma doll just visible at the end of the corridor.  
  
This was considerably better than the display Akechi'd eventually managed to cognize on the visor of his helmet.  
  
The upper floors of the Diet were, contrary to many Palaces, relatively low-security.  There were entire floors with only two or three Shadows wandering: unfortunately, not only were they all high-leveled overtly military units, the faceless cognitive secretaries would summon them en masse on every floor.  Akechi ducked into alcoves and hid behind potted plants, in shadowy corners on the stairwell beneath the cameras he'd long since disabled, and -- once -- under a coffee bar in one of the many stately lounges.  
  
Eventually, though, he reached the vent he used to access a rooftop garden, and from there it was a relatively straight shot freeclimbing down the starboard side of the Diet building, though for a change he had to use the holes his claws had left in the stone instead of making them anew.  
  
The deck at the bow of the ship continued to plow through endless sunken skyscrapers.  Akechi stretched, staring out into the ruin of Shido's ambitions, and seriously considered just going home.  
  
Back.  The closest he'd had to home was Leblanc, and he'd ruined that too.  
  
If he didn't have a Persona, would his heart resemble... this?  
  
 _You owe me._  
  
He didn't quite hear it, not even as loudly as a memory, but it was there all the same.  
  
He pulled half-heartedly at his new mask.  "Kurusu."  
  
No response.  Just the impression of one raised brow.  _Try again_ , it seemed to say.  
  
"... Joker?"  Please.  
  
 _You are not this stupid, Akechi._  
  
He could still go home.  Personae weren't as loud in reality.  ... He might not even realize how his natural impulses had shifted until he was standing right back on this deck with the Persona radiating offense in his mind.  
  
"Akira."  
  
The mask pulled free in a ripple of blue fire.  
  
Of course it did.  That was so like Akira had been.  Just a torment and a bright blot on the face of reality.  What else would this Persona be than impossible.  
  
Akechi steeled himself and turned to stare it full in the face.  
  
Kurusu-- Joker-- _it_ had no mask on, no glasses.  Just Akira's gray eyes, edged in gold and barely visible under the wild mess of his hair, and the blank almost-smile that could be covering anything from 'I am bored stiff of making coffee' to 'I would like a healing item before I fall over please'.  
  
No blood.  Akechi had been so sure there'd be blood.  
  
"... Well?" Akechi said flatly.  "You're out."  
  
"I'm as surprised about this as you," it replied. "But seeing in your head, it makes sense.  Robin Hood didn't fit until I saw Loki."  
  
It did, actually, but Akechi wasn't about to use a Persona as an armchair therapist on the literal doorstep of his father's distorted desires.  That was entirely too Freudian for words.  
  
Its almost-smile flickered upwards.  "You have the power of the Wild Card.  Like I did."  
  
"I don't."  He'd seen how Joker worked.  Charming Shadows into his adoring syncophants was not quite something Akechi could do.  Shadows weren't an audience.  They worked much more like individual people, which... didn't make sense.  
  
"Not quite," the Persona agreed.  "You don't know how to make connections with people.  Which means you have to do it the hard way."  
  
Story of his life.  "Then no."  The hard way was the longer way, and what did he want with anything inhabiting Shido's disgusting heart?  
  
He didn't even see Joker move.  Just the next second, the Persona had him staring into its eyes, one fist harshly yanking Akechi's head back and Joker looming over him, chest-to-chest and chains pulled tight through Akechi's hands.  
  
It was going to force him.  Or abandon him.  He'd made a pact to summon it...  
  
It smirked, eyes blazing challenge.  "Don't you want to see what happens?"  
  
 _Oh_.  So, even a shell with Akira's face could... still surprise him.  
  
Akechi swallowed.  His throat was dry, the well of magic behind it mere trickles seeping up from dust... but the spell starting to prickle in his lungs didn't take much.  It felt like the spiky thud of strike, the teal fizzle of healing... it circulated like Growth and Invigorate... had the glassiness of Repel, of High Counter...  
  
What _was_ this spell?  
  
Only one way to find out.  
  
"Shrive."  
  
Akira's dagger sank home in his guts.  
  
Akechi choked on the pain.  So... so this was what happened... vengeance.  He stared into the Persona's merciless eyes, clawed fruitlessly at its coat, coughed up great gobs of nothing as it twisted the blade up into his chest.  
  
 _Despised, benighted child, thrown into the darkness through no fault of your own._  
  
The Persona wasn't speaking.  This was a different voice... deeper, resonant, drinking in the pain as the Persona's dagger sliced sickeningly around his heart.  Akechi's eyes flew wide.  
  
 _You who reached for greatness through a mask of beauty, of brilliance, only to be rejected by love and light alike._  
  
 _You have come here in pursuit of your deepest urge... It burns, does it not?_  
  
It did, with far more than the heavy blade.  The expression on the Persona's face... so hatefully blank, unfazed...  
  
There was just enough space for Akechi to get his fingertips on the corner of his mask, down where it nearly touched his jaw.  Akira's shell didn't even bother to notice.  
  
 _This raging fire which floods the soul..._   
  
Betrayed.  Reviled.  And, for so much of it, for nothing more than mere existence.  
  
 _I am thou... thou art I... thou who hast turned thy thoughts away from the cold, unfeeling light..._  
  
 _I remain, your obedient servant,_  
  
"Le Fantôme!"  
  
Akira vanished.  The blade, the grip in his hair, the blazing chains... the last to go was just the faintest hint of a smile, the hateful bastard.  What remained, coalescing out of increasingly golden fire as Akechi staggered and clutched at his unmarked stomach... had his same new mask.  The Phantom of the Opera's famous half-mask, cutting diagonally from temple to jaw.    
  
The Phantom himself, Le Fantôme, was otherwise a terrible, elongated creature in charcoals and deep blues, a puppet-joint caricature of an operatic lead.  Its skills settled into Akechi's mind -- Fire, Psychic, Brainwash -- before it inclined its head and followed Akira into nothingness.  
  
Dazed, sore, Akechi exited the MetaNav and blearily made his way home.  The tiny studio was dim, striped with shadows from the bars of his laundry rail, and he barely managed to drop his gloves in a puddle by his futon and toss his jacket over the corner, before collapsing onto it and passing out.  
  
He didn't dream that night.  
  
Morning dawned too early, too cold, and too stiff, his body convinced once again that he'd overdone it in the Metaverse.  Today, though, that first frigid breath seized in his lungs, and Akechi curled up and coughed over the beeping of his alarm until it subsided into silence.  
  
Psychosomatic reaction to Shrive's overcompensating dagger, check.  
  
 _See if I ever call on you again, Kurusu-not-Akira._  
  
Its response, or more likely Akechi's own, was to take notice of the smell under the blanket and make wistful concepts of a hot bath.  
  
He'd be lucky if he had enough time for a shower, Akechi thought, dragging himself out of bed.  Media face and move like he hadn't just seized up at the cold once again.  Unfold the ironing board from its wall panel, plug in the iron, strip off his school uniform and once again remind himself not to fall asleep in the thing.  
  
A wet washcloth dealt with his underarms, groin, and feet, and then clean socks and underwear started to make him feel human again.  He warmed his hands over the iron for a moment, then sprayed down his uniform and set to work.  
  
 _Rice?_ his stomach piped up hopefully.  
  
 _Tea_ , he thought back viciously.  He had bottled tea and apples, and just enough room in his briefcase for one of the latter.  
  
His jacket hadn't taken any wrinkles in the night, fortunately.  His gloves had gathered a dust bunny, but he had a clean pair on the kitchen counter.  Replacing them with the iron to let it cool safely, he pulled on the clean gloves, stepped into his shoes, and did one last check in the mirror on the back of the apartment door.  
  
Tie just that perfect touch too loose, to make him seem personable.  Gloves to give the impression of fastidiousness that people wanted to see in a detective.  Stylishly professional jacket, cut straight and long to hide just how thin he was.  The pretty hair of a romantic prince, fairytales instead of politics and war.  
  
Briefcase.  
  
Media smile.  
  
Goro Akechi stepped out into the world like it was any other day.


	2. Chapter 2

_Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen-_ -  
  
No.  Akechi mashed the pause button with his thumb and brought up his phone, looking for a different playlist.  Der Holle Rache was too... high, too pretty, even with Diana Damrau's skill at bringing the rage out.  It grated with how stale it seemed today.  
  
At least it was clear that this was Le Fantome's taste, because Akechi usually liked this playlist.  But it was all mixed arias, musicals, and symphonic metal, and apparently today he just could not deal with lyric sopranos and strumming through the bridges.  
  
He got through exactly one line of J-rock before he killed that too and went for his German thrash playlist.  Something he couldn't understand a word of.  That's what he needed.  
  
He carried the memory of that playlist all through school -- exams were in three weeks, so take diligent notes and show attentive face, and of course he'd long since agreed that it would hardly be fair for a prodigy like him to answer questions: why, the rest of the class would give up on trying! -- through lunch, with his apple and two large bottles of juice to keep his stomach silent, and into his afternoon session at the police station.  Of course Goro Akechi was politely exempted from the morass of paperwork that was still quietly circulating its way into conveniently-placed hands, and from there into shredders, erasing all official knowledge that he'd ever  
  
 _been one of them_  
  
... infiltrated.  
  
His tea tasted like floor cleaner in his throat.  
  
Another water, then.  Clearly this bottle had slipped through quality control.  
  
But with the Phantom Thief paperwork still at large, an amount equal to it had been shifted downstream onto the shoulders and desks of lower-ranked cops, secretaries, and consultants.  Namely, Akechi.  
  
He skimmed through the arrest sheet.  Male, turned himself in, twenty-three counts of fraud, a confession that started out with "I just suddenly realized what I was doing to people who were just like my parents".  
  
... It certainly looked like it had been spurred by Mementos, but that was quite impossible.  The other kids were helpless.  Demoralized.  This might just be... no.  It was clearly a shift in Mementos itself, perhaps a cognitive artifact of how, because the Phantom Thieves had been taking requests and succeeding, now Mementos itself was acting to break the individualized Shadows.  Yes.  Clearly.  It would settle again soon enough.  
  
Akechi stamped it, taped the file shut, and set it in his outbox.  
  
Seven more to go, and then he could have dinner.  He was thinking  
  
 _curry_  
  
... oden.  
  
He had to pass by the Diet on his way to the train station, and made a point of not even considering entering the Palace.  The Persona sulked like a cat in the back of his mind all the way home.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
That night, he paid for the previous night's dreamlessness.  
  
There was only one passage through the rough-hewn stone, steep and Mementos-red, and Goro seemed to catch his hands on every broken, gritty rock as he climbed.  The occasional crack through showed only the speckled snake of a pitchfork-wielding mob's torches far below, and that was what was chasing him, jackboot tromping echoing in time with a clock ticking erratically, overwound, too fast.  
  
Only one way to go.  The red light was the flickering of torchlight, always just a single corner behind him in this twisting tunnel.  
  
But that was behind.  It didn't matter what was behind, only what was ahead, the safety at the very top of the cave.  
  
 _Tick.  Tick-tick-tick.  Tick-tick-tick-tock tick-skit-click-click clitter-click_ \--  
  
The clock was going to eat him.  
  
Goro climbed faster, leaving bloody handprints behind.  They were soon followed by bloody footprints, his socks shredding on his feet and falling away.  Stalactites raked through his hair, left smears of watery mud on his face.  
  
The clock was going to eat him but it wouldn't be in time!  Time, time, wouldn't be in time--  
  
A last set of stalactites ripped his shirt half off, but he stumbled onto polished tile and into a vaulted chamber.  It was perfectly round, perfectly empty, and the light of a million stars shone through ivy trailing across the far wall, missing so the room would be open to the sky.  
  
Slowly, Goro drifted across the space.  The ivy's shadows lay in long bars across the floor, across his body, melding into lines of royal blue tile radiating out from a half-circle at the center of the lost wall.  What would've been a full circle, if the floor had stretched out to form a balcony-- it had, once, centering the circle upon the threshold, but the balcony had long since been sheered away.  
  
The mob's torches spiraled in circles around the tower like worshippers at Mecca.  No prayers to this towering stone, though; only prayers to righteousness.  To justice.  To truth.  
  
Behind him, the first of the mob began to stream into the room, serrated mandibles clacking.  
  
Ah.  Not pitchforks.  Shovels.  
  
"It's time for beeeed, murderer," the monk-ant in the lead chittered.  
  
"Time for bed," the crowd droned as it grew.  More monk-ants circled the edges of the room.  Surrounded Goro.  Reached out for him with limbs like barbed wire, like spiked chains, coiling around his unresisting wrists and up his arms.  "Time for bed."  
  
The shovels shattered tile and bit into dirt.  
  
"Time for bed."  
  
Goro watched the stars wheel across the sky as the ordained mob dug his grave, and as the chains pulled him inside.  
  
"Time for bed," they chanted as they shoveled the dirt back in.  "Time for bed.  Time for--"  
  
A hand reached past the shovels of dirt and grabbed his wrist, the chains vanishing like they were never there.  A human hand, which pulled as if the dirt piling high around Goro was nothing but air.  And it was.  
  
Akira raised a eyebrow at him.  "Ants?"  
  
"They're very social," Akechi replied defensively, and with that he woke up.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Akechi lay dazed in his bed, staring at the dim bars of light across his ceiling.  That had been... vivid.  And it wasn't fading, as his dreams usually did before he'd finished waking.  
  
Of course, Loki and Robin Hood had never wandered into his dreams that he recalled.  It would make sense if... that Persona's... appearance in his dream had strengthened the memory in reality.  
  
Unbidden, a memory rose up, a small computer cafe's booth cast in tired blues under the glow of a fire exit sign with all the yellow baked out of the translucent plastic.  
  
 _... so-called observer effect is a layman's misunderstanding of the quantum wave function, and has no bearing on aleph-null physics.  However, in integer-numbered aleph dimensions, aleph-null cognition acts as a fifth fundamental force..._  
  
 _... taking ownership of a personified cognition seems to activate culturalized pathways, so-called 'white knowledge', within the brain of an aleph-null being acting in aleph-integer space; this culturalization then invariably categorizes the personfied cognition as a 'Persona'..._  
  
 _... cases of aleph-i space described as being "between dreams and reality".._.  
  
Akechi exhaled slowly.  He really must be tired, if he was thinking about that woman's research.  It was clearly just the juxtaposition of those two words and the odd color of the light, though.  The old streetlight that usually dominated his room in sickly yellows must've died, leaving the pre-dawn winter's light to cast the edges in a very similar blue to the dingy computer cafe in his memory.  
  
No matter.  Being awake this early just meant he could get a good scrubbing in the bath.  And maybe (he calculated his budget as he dragged himself from the bed) yes, he could afford the water for a soak, though he would have to keep his showering lukewarm so he would have enough hot water.    
  
After all, he didn't have to spend money on that cafe anymore, so he couldn't get any recompense from That Man.  
  
Shido's ruin was so close.  That would be (it had to be) recompense enough.  
  
Akechi had to remind himself of that again later that day, when his phone chimed as he was sitting down to lunch.  
  
 _Izumo Hirokichi - C_  
 _Moriya Norishiga - C_  
 _Ishiyama Taki - D_  
 _Muto Ema - D/C_  
 _Otani Megu - D_  
  
There was no set date, but going by the names (three men, only one of whom needed to die, and two women whose husbands were well-regarded candidates running against Shido), the implicit "promptly" meant "before the election".  
  
Well.  At least he hadn't bitten into his apple yet.  Akechi put it back in his briefcase, took out a notebook and pen, and hit the app.  
  
"Izumo Hirokichi," he murmured quietly, making a show of deep contemplation as he tapped the half-full page with the tip of his pen, pretending to consider a note.  
  
 _No candidates found_ , the MetaNav informed him blandly.  As it did for the next four names.  
  
Good.  They were all ordinary Shadows.  He wouldn't need to deduce keywords and spend days navigating a Palace, so he could start on Sunday and spread it out over the course of only three or four days.  Another destructive spree that could be blamed on the Pha--  
  
They weren't operative anymore.  He didn't need to plan around their thankfully-predictable schedules.  
  
Akechi double-checked his calendar, though he'd looked just that morning and Shido's false Medjed was polite enough to mark last-minute additions with a text chime.  It could've gone off while he was in class, or during the break when he might've missed it in the noise of the other students.  But no, there was nothing scheduled until Saturday afternoon.  
  
He would go to Mementos tonight.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Mementos wasn't nearly as nerve-wracking as it had been two years ago, when the wandering creatures that exploded into categorized Shadows and slime would come running to target Akechi if they spotted him -- which had happened on several occasions, until Akechi managed to drag a camoflage suit out of Loki and learned to free-climb the walls -- but it was still a deeply unsettling experience, even though the creatures bolted from Akechi on sight these days.  Something about the lack of scent, the utter nothingness laying thick in one's throat, the vaguest sense that the walls were breathing when you weren't looking...  
  
And the man in his little private twist of reality, on the sixth floor of Mementos, was daring to waste Akechi's time, keeping him in this terrible place, to _talk_ at him.  
  
"It's hardly an election without competition... someone needs to show the world Shido was elected fairly, don't you think?"  Ishiyama Taki's Shadow smirked.  "And I can use this loss to build up my own electoral base when Shido's policies throw the masses to the wolves."  Yellow eyes widened, a crazed grin stretching across its face.  "You'd know all about that, _wouldn't you, Akechi-kun_."  
  
One Eigaon shredded the newly-formed Onmoraki so harshly it couldn't even revert before it vaporized.  
  
Akechi truly preferred the normal Mementos Shadows.  They were little more than breathing dolls, nothing that bothered to speak to you, nothing that bothered trying to explain themselves or compare themselves to you.  
  
Nothing like the creatures... that group... constantly sought out.  But that must be what you got when you hunted too deeply in Mementos.  The place clearly didn't appreciate the intrusions: it always had Akechi's targets docile and readily available in the highest block.  
  
Convenient.  Helpful.  Necessary.  It wouldn't do to choke when it finally came time for the true kill, after all.  
  
Even if Muto Ema's professionally-short short mop of dark curls and empty eyes were...  
  
Completely unfamiliar.  The perfect makeup and bright media smile to outshine Akechi's own made them so.  
  
Akechi prodded her to face away from the door with the blunt curve of the claws on his camoflage suit, then raised Loki.  
  
Dark curls and eyes trained upon something else in the distance, as if Akechi didn't exist...  
  
 _I hate you_.  
  
"Call of Chaos!"  
  
He left with the woman's enraged screams echoing in his ears.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Several hours after he'd left Mementos, all of 400 yen richer, his phone chimed.  Akechi set aside his math homework, only to find he'd gotten a text, not a new calendar event.  Odd... but not entirely unprecedented.  
  
 _Excellent timing on Otani,_ it read.  There was no sender.  
  
Akechi let his brow furrow and turned on the news.  The show was currently doing the weather (partly cloudy, highs around 5' C), but there was a scrollbar at the bottom.  It took about a minute for Otani's name to come up.  
  
 _Prime Minister Candidate Arinori Otani's wife found dead in Shinjuku hotel; police have taken a 46-year-old man in for questioning._  
  
Bile rose at the implication.  He'd just killed a woman having an affair... an affair that could've been used to push Otani out of the race, leaving her undamaged... and she'd died exactly the same, horrific way that Okumura had, eyes rolling back so hard it ruptured the veins inside the socket, blood gushing thick and black in those seconds before oxygenization could color the depths.  Choking on a scream.  All her muscles locked so that she couldn't even have collapsed.  
  
He turned off the tv and locked his phone in two sharp jabs.  (He was not going to check if she had children.  Clearly she didn't.  Obviously.  ... She'd have kept her affairs to school hours if she had.  Therefore, by logical deduction, she didn't.)  
  
Of course.  
  
Of... course.  
  
Akechi turned back to his math homework and methodically, mechanically, finished the problem set, before looking at the history textbook.  
  
... It was just reading.  He could do it on the train in the morning.  Not that it really mattered much... but he couldn't risk slipping now.  Not now.  Not after so much.  
  
Not when it was just twelve more days.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
The kimono under Goro's manicured fingertips was a lush, cool blue under its bloodstains, and stiff enough from layering that it cupped around his shoulders without needing to cling.  
  
Outside, the canals glowed with embers and dark ashes, and gaily-dressed beasts sailed by on knifelike party boats under swaying red lanterns.  Every so often, fire would flare up when a drunken hyena spilled his sake over the side, but it didn't scorch the boats, or the lattice wall Goro lounged behind.  
  
They would come for him eventually, whoever hadn't spent all their money yet.  He stretched, and the tassels dangling from the kanzashi in his upswept hair brushed lightly across his throat.  Eventually.  He might even get yen out of it himself.  
  
Not that he ever did.  
  
One hand smoothed away nonexistent wrinkles in the trailing ends of his violet obi.  Eventually a client would come.  
  
It was very peaceful, here, in the shelter of the display cage.  His obi had fallen leaves in the weave, sensed by touch more than by sight in the dimness, and he traced the outline of one atop the knot pulled firmly against his chest.  
  
A shape blocked what little light there was, and Goro looked up through his eyelashes.  
  
... That... wasn't a beast's silhouette.  
  
"Akechi?" the young man perched in the window asked, something stricken in his voice.  
  
Whoever this was, that pain was unacceptable in a client.  Goro raised his closed fan to touch his chest, the stark line of it to trace attention from painted lips to the point where the kimono was held shut by a single, easily-pulled knot.  "Oh," he breathed, leaning forward just a bit, to show his pale shoulders to best effect.  "You've come at last."  
  
"At last?" the man echoed.  Slim hands curled around the lattice bars.  Uncouth.  "Akechi... how long have you _been_ here?"  
  
Goro blinked.  "... So very long," he eventually managed.  "But every moment was worth it, now that you're here, handsome."  
  
Silence.  Then, "... Akechi.  It's Kurusu.  Akira Kurusu."  
  
The Persona.  
  
Oh.  "... My mistake," Goro managed, drawing himself into seiza.  Akira was almost certainly not a client at all.  Although... if he was, and Goro lost his business... "I take it you aren't interested in my services, then?"  
  
The startled jerk nearly had Akira falling backwards into the fiery canal.  He barely caught himself in time.  "No!  No."  
  
That was a shame.  Akira looked like he'd be a kind client.  Perhaps not even interested in the elite options at all... It would've been nice to not have to kill someone tonight.  Oh well.  Goro made shooing motions with his fan.  "Then, if you would stop blocking their view, I do have to be available for service--"  
  
"Goro you're _dreaming_."  
  
"Well _that_ hardly makes a difference to the clientele."  
  
Akira raked a hand through his messy hair, pressing his forehead into his palm for a moment.  "... Fine," he eventually said, letting his hand fall.  "How much for your time?"  
  
Ooooh.  Goro smiled sweetly and flicked his fan open.  "You'll need to speak to the vultures," he said, tilting his head just enough to set his tassels swinging in their direction.  "Ask for number fourteen."  
  
He stood, turning slowly to display the painted nape of his neck and shoulders, the curve of his ass under the obi, the elegant trail of the kimono's skirts pooled about his bare feet, and headed languidly towards the shoji screen in the back corner.  
  
"Goro..."  
  
"The vultures will bring you to me," he said, and stepped into a modern hotel room, the kimono forgotten.  The nightstand would have condoms, but Goro checked the pockets of his frayed booty shorts anyway.  You never knew if the previous occupants had used all the supplies up, after all.  
  
He pushed the woman's body out of the way and sat on the edge of the bed, leaving the clean corner available for the client.  The blood pooling in the stitching looped across the coverlet wouldn't make Goro any dirtier than he already was, nor would any amount of toweling help wipe off the blood.  It dripped from his hands, which were red nearly up to the elbows, and was soaking into the hem of his translucent crop top and the fishnet across his thighs.  
  
The client walked in and stopped short.  
  
"Is something wrong?" Goro asked.  Maybe the client had wanted him standing when he came in...?  
  
Akira swallowed thickly.  "...She's dead."  
  
She...?  Oh.  Goro blinked, glancing over to the body arched in rigor mortis, face an unrecognizeable rictus of gory agony.  "Sorry about that," he said, turning the gently rueful media face on.  "The cleaning crew should've been through already.  I suppose they're getting a bit sloppy."  
  
"Akechi..."  
  
"I'm overworking them a bit, though, so it's to be expected."  Smile.  Clients liked smiles.  
  
This one didn't, rubbing a hand over his face.  "Goro.  What is going on here?"  
  
It wasn't obvious?  "Shido sells my services and I perform them," Goro answered easily.  "This is the way things are."  
  
That got him a dismayed look.  "That's it, I'm waking you up," Akira muttered.  
  
Goro's heart sank a little in disappointment.  They could've had something nice in this dream, but apparently that wasn't going to happen.  Akira was just... unattainable.  Once again.  "It's really not going to make a difference."  
  
"Yes, it will."  Akira grabbed his arm, grip slipping a little in the blood before it tightened around Goro's wrist.  "Just... you have to summon me the next time you're in the Metaverse, Goro.  You _have_ to."  
  
Repeat business?  Goro beamed.  "Of course, master."  
  
Akira's expression darkened, and he yanked hard enough that reality shattered.  
  
Akechi woke in his bed with a thump, his heart racing.  
  
What had.  What was.  That.  He'd been a _whore_?  Hired by that Persona?  (He was a _hitman_ and he was _not_ prostituting himself out to his conscience, what was _wrong_ with his subconscious?)  
  
 _You have to summon me_ , it had said.  
  
 _I will do no such thing_ , Akechi thought back at it.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Akechi held onto his resolve all through the next afternoon, as he climbed the outside of Shido's Diet, snuck through the highest unsecured vent, and crept past secretary and soldier Shadows.  He managed to avoid all but a couple of fights, Le Fantôme blasting King Frosts away with an Agidyne so powerful it nearly made Akechi stagger when it made a critical hit.  
  
It seemed to take hours before he found a safe room, two floors down from his encounter with his cognitive double, and could evaluate his condition.  
  
He really missed that team's strange items and medicines.  He was down nearly half his HP and a good quarter of his SP--   
  
No.  That was the girl's childish computer-gamer way of describing the odd sensation of discrete, countable units of health and energy ticking in the backs of their heads in the Metaverse.  Akechi was not down whatever points, he was sore enough that he could probably get through another four floors similar to the previous five without healing.  He didn't need to heal.  
  
... But if something resisted fire, or bless and curse, and got in a good hit...  
  
No.  No, he would be fine.  
  
He was being stupid.  
  
 _You promised._  
  
Shut up, Akira.  
  
 _You are_ hurt.  _You need to heal._  
  
"I SAID shut UP!" Akechi yelled at the safe room's garish painting.  
  
Silence.  
  
He slumped into one of the safe room's chairs, burying his face in his hands.  Gods, he hurt... This fucking place.  "The Diet isn't even seven stories tall, you pretentious shit," he muttered.  So surely he had to be close.  Surely he _didn't need to heal_.  
  
Who knew if a cognitive world needed to conform to its own dimensions, though.  He could have ten or even twenty more floors to go before he found a way in to wherever Shido's Shadow was hiding.  
  
 _So call on me and_ heal _already._  
  
Dammit.  He didn't want to see that Persona again.  ... Not that refusal was stopping the damned thing, as evidenced by those dreams that _still_ refused to fade.  And he was being stupid if he didn't heal.  
  
He reached for his mask in defeat.  "Akira."  
  
Blue fire and rattling chains, and a spray of blood that vanished into nothingness before his eyes.  And the heavy sensation of something terrible and sublime looming silently behind him.  
  
"Diar--"  
  
The Persona grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him around to face it, cutting the spell off midword.  " _Tell me_ Shido doesn't make you have sex with people," it demanded, gray eyes wide and intense, that ring of gold burning.  
  
" _What?_ " Akechi yelped.  "No!"  The Persona stared fiercely into his eyes, waiting.  "Never.  No.  He--" _has absolutely no qualms about people pressuring teens into that, and even though he recognized me enough to have his cognition of me gloat about it, he has no sentiment about my mother._   "--I'm too valuable as an untouchable Detective Prince."  
  
Now that, the Persona seemed to accept as truth.  Its grip gentled and loosened, enough so that Akechi could wrench himself free, and after he did the Persona settled in to watch him with Akira's endless, unruffled patience.  
  
"Diarama," he ordered, closing his eyes against the spell's light.  When he opened them again, the loss of pain leaving him feeling refreshed despite the drain on his... _fine_ , it was a useful term to use... SP, the Persona was gone.  
  
And good riddance.  The thing's eyes were unsettling.  
  
Akechi made one last check of his weapons, his other three Personae -- the ones who were actually useful in battle, and looked and behaved like the scraps of collective unconsciousness that they were -- to see who might be close to gaining more power and new abilities, brushed the nonexistent wrinkles from his clothes, and headed out into the fray once more.  The safe room was just a few feet from the fire stairs, across from an elevator Akechi wasn't stupid enough to use, and he headed down.  
  
He did not have twenty more floors.  
  
He had a miniboss.  
  
 _I told you so._  
  
Shut up, Akira.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- thanks goes to waywren for beta and suggestions throughout the fic.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- a mention is made of fatalities in the subway incident. This is actually explicitly denied by canon (there is a news report of injuries but no fatalities, thanks Lilithium for the reminder!), but I find that impossible to believe. It was a high-speed underground train derailment, and trains don't come with seat belts or airbags.  
> \- Tojo Hideki was the Prime Minister of Japan during WW2

If the miniboss had been the Shadow of Admiral Murano (second in command to the Prime Minister's role as commander-in-chief) instead of a cognition of him, or if Shido had any idea of actual fighting tactics instead of just political manipulation, Akechi would not have survived.  
  
He peeked through the door the Admiral had been guarding, saw only a small curtained balcony overlooking a cavernous space, and stumbled inside to collapse in the lone chair there and shake.  
  
 _I almost died._  
  
Alone, unknown... just a mysterious disappearance and on to the next headline... which would probably be praising Shido.  
  
Bile rose in his throat at the thought.  
  
 _I need to be more careful._  
  
So he couldn't avoid using the Persona's healing skills, or his buffs, any longer.  Nor could he continue refusing to remember the team's time in Mementos and in Sae's Palace, and the SP items Joker had carried and passed around judiciously.  
  
Leblanc Coffee was... out of the question.  So were Okumura's vegetables, and the adhesive medical patches since Akechi had no idea where Joker got his strange medicines.  But the... Arginade, that was it... and the Water of Rebirth, those were vending machine drinks.  Rare, but a quick Google search should find vending machines that carried them.  And the Admiral had dropped enough money that he could afford several of each.  
  
If he ran into another set of Shadows... or, worse, another miniboss, though who knew what cognition would surpass Admiral Murano here...  
  
... Where was he, anyway?  
  
Akechi pushed himself to sit up straight, and looked out between the tied-back curtains into the room.  
  
A Daruma-painted curtain stared fiercely out over the tiered seats of the Diet Assembly Hall, framing the Prime Minister's high podium like a stage backdrop.  The air there shimmered and twirled faintly, the very core of the entire Palace that Akechi had thought to be only an irrelevant nexus of pressure for so many years.  
  
He was in the Shadow's lair.  
  
Which, he thought as all his muscles seized up, preventing him from twitching right out of the chair in a reflexive jerk, meant this was _not_ a safe place to be sitting around contemplating his plans.  Shido himself was lurking somewhere nearby.  
  
Carefully, watchfully, Akechi slipped out of the chair while making no sudden movement to catch the eye of anything on the lookout below, and he crept back out the door as silently as he could manage.  He'd secured his route.  It was time to go.  
  
He could spend the rest of the election season resting, stocking up on those energy drinks, and keeping his head down as Shido's oh-so-loyal little pet.  That meant he wouldn't need to call on that Persona for at least another week... or more, so Shido wouldn't die suddenly before the votes were tabulated.  He might even manage to avoid summoning it entirely, if he didn't encounter other Shadows on the day of reckoning.  
  
Akechi bared his teeth at the eye-cupping-the-world logo painted in the safe room.  "A fatal oversight, at last," he told it, and hit the app to go home.  
  
Returning to reality this time felt like surging out of a pool.  A long, slow exhale reminded lungs that real air didn't have to be gulped in heaving gasps, but gravity reasserted itself, dragging at already-worn muscles.  Akechi paused for that heartbeat, letting his body remember weight, before striding out into the stream of evening commuters without faltering.  
  
Just eleven more days, and Shido would die.  
  
Akechi could rest then.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Thursday brought with it a rash of flu-masked people hacking their way through the subway, and by Friday nearly a quarter of Akechi's class was out sick.  So there went any hope of escaping paperwork at the station before ten.  As far as Akechi could deduce, unlike a high school student, a police officer was a Representative Of The Nation and Sniffling Was Unacceptable, so they called in sick at the first sneeze.  Which meant the station would most likely be half-empty, but the paperwork still needed to be done, so...  
  
Wonderful, he grumbled internally.  
  
Of course, it would be even more wonderful if he came down with a cold himself.  He probably was: he caught a glimpse of telltale blonde hair near the Diet, on the way to the station, so clearly he was hallucinating from fever.  
  
 _Obviously_.  
  
Once at work, he rinsed his face with cold water, touched up his concealer, and checked his inbox.  Evidence cross-reference form... shoplifting charge... a statement from Niijima that Akechi had gone into the interrogation room after her, now how had that gotten into the file circulation at all?    
  
It couldn't have, much less reached Akechi's desk, unless someone wanted him to see it.  Eye on the world.  _I'm watching you_.  
  
Of course they were.  Akechi didn't let his expression change as he calmly slid the page out of the file and put it in another one, mentally labeled 'to be destroyed' once it wouldn't seem suspicious to have the shredder going.  
  
... Where _was_ Sae, anyway?  He hadn't seen her since that night.  Not that he thought she might be... well, actually, since they'd stolen her Treasure, she might be sentimental enough now to be blaming herself for... the death.  It didn't seem likely, though.  Steely Sae had been that way long before her Palace grew.  
  
Of course, she was the last person to officially be at the interrogation room, and it was no secret that Sae was not in the favor of the SIU's replacement Director, not that she was particularly popular in the first place.  She had three strikes against her: she was female; she was twenty-six, very young for a lawyer; and she was twenty-six, getting too old to excuse being unmarried.  The Joker mess was planned to be the perfect excuse to oust her from the SIU.  
  
That wouldn't last much longer, either.  
  
Nine more days.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
On Saturday, Akechi had another interview.  After the usual banal introductions and pleasantries, the host beamed and went for the meat of the filming.  
  
"I would never have imagined that their leader would commit suicide," he said with morning-gossip cheer, which did more to spear ice through Akechi's stomach than the actual words did.  "Akechi, did you..." he paused a moment, " _anticipate_ this curious turn of events?"  
  
Deflect.  "Oh, certainly not to this extent," Akechi replied, as if he hadn't noticed the scandal-seeking barb in the pause.  "But it is important to note that he was the mastermind behind the recent commotion."  Evil, he may as well have said.  The kindest person he'd ever known... but the public didn't know that.  "Getting captured must have wounded his pride irreparably.  Such things often happen to insurgent leaders."  It might even have been true, but who was going to bother to fact-check?  
  
The woman on the host's other side turned to the camera.  "According to the police," she said, "the whereabouts of the other members are still currently unknown.  Considering that they no longer require testimony from the leader--"  
  
Well, that was certainly one way to put it.  "May I butt in for a second?" Akechi interrupted, before the woman could say anything even less coherent.  When the host gave slightly bewildered permission, Akechi leaned forward a bit to meet the lone eye of the camera.  "The Phantom Thieves may have laid low since then... but they must not be excused!"  _I must not be excused._   "I don't care if they come after me!"  If only they could.  But Akechi didn't have a Palace or a Shadow, just a pair of Personae that could wipe the floor with theirs.  "For the victims of their evil deeds, and for their families," _for Akira_ , "I will capture the remaining Phantom Thieves, no matter what!"  
  
Enthusiastic applause brought him back to earth.  _When did I stand up?_ he wondered, feeling his cheeks heat under his professional makeup.  He quickly sat back down.  "My apologies.  I didn't mean to get so worked up."  
  
The host enthused and complimented his idiocy, completely oblivious to the fact that the oh-so-gentle romantic Detective Prince should be, at the very least, considerably more offended and horrified by Joker's death... at the loss of an explanation, if nothing else.  
  
Of course, Shido would get suspicious if he did that.  
  
And then the entire studio audience decided Akechi would _annihilate_ the Phantom Thieves.  
  
"Looks like you can't back down now!"  
  
Akechi smiled, and let the acid in his stomach churn.  No.  No, he couldn't back down now.  "I will do the best I can," he promised.  "Oh, but I do have to study for my college entrance exams.  I might not be able to promise that..."  
  
The entire studio audience laughed, delighted.  
  
 _None of these people know what I've done.  They don't know I was an unwanted child... that every family who looked at me seemed to know what I would become, what I_ have _become... the monster under the devoted honor student, the ace detective... the thing that broke free thanks to the Nav app and the power bestowed on me by some terrible god..._  
  
 _I've managed to dispose of everyone that got in my way.  Even..._  
  
The audience's laughter rang garish and hollow, even as it thankfully died down.  
  
"But still, wasn't their leader's suicide a letdown for you, given how long it took to apprehend him?" the host asked brightly.  "I think if it were me, I would've collapsed from the shock."  
  
"True," Akechi murmured, crossing his legs and slipping into a thoughtful pose, eyes on the restful dark brown of his slacks.  The orange everywhere was making his head hurt.  "It did make me feel somewhat dizzy."  
  
He'd let the wall hold him up all through the confirmation call to Shido, and managed to hold his stomach contents down until after he'd gotten home in the wee hours of the morning.  Dizzy was a mild word for it.  
  
"... Just a little, though," he outright lied.  "Perhaps my mind was worked up due to the major task I had undertaken."  His first and only direct murder.    
  
... Second.  The guard didn't really count, though.  
  
Akira's phone rang.  
  
It took a moment for Akechi to realize the sound was in the audience, that the host had heard it too and was playing it off jokingly.  "See?" the man said.  "Even Akechi's face has stiffened up!"  
  
Just the same ringtone.  Not... it was just the _ringtone_ , gods.  "... ah.  Sorry about that," Akechi managed, before plastering on his best media smile again.  "I'm not bothered.  Just make sure to turn it off before you go to the movies!"  
  
Their hollow laughter seemed to fill the rest of the interview, charming interplay and plastic smiles and the spotlights pooling hot on his face almost liquid-hot... It seemed to take hours before they wrapped up, and Akechi could escape into the night.  
  
It didn't help.  
  
The crowds in Akasaka were bustling with warmly-clad people who didn't know.  The trains were packed like sardines with people who didn't know.  Shibuya station echoed with the chatter and rustling shopping bags of _people who didn't know_.  The platform where he'd purposely run into Akira was--  
  
Akechi fled up the stairs and into the square, filled with romantic couples and young families clustering together under trees wound with blue and white fairy lights, shopping at little stands doing a brisk business in steaming coffee.  
  
He hit the app before he even realized he'd taken his phone out of his pocket.  
  
The familiar blood-swirled sea of Mementos swallowed him down, leaving him wavering on the stained concrete facing the turnstiles.  Silent.  Empty.  The very, very faintest pulse of something that might be alive, or might just be his own heartbeat in his ears as his mind strained for the sounds of a city... the same eerie sense people had in a power outage.  
  
No one to obliviously brush shoulders with a killer.  
  
No one to look at him and never see the madman that had driven off so many parents.  
  
No one to... look at him, and see nothing but the madman, to want nothing _but_ the killer.  
  
No one.  
  
... Just one.  
  
Goro ripped the mask from his face.  "Akira!"  
  
The Persona formed in front of him this time.  Unlike in battle, the flare of fire seemed to bubble up from a point about level with Goro's knees, outlining little clustering spheres of Shadow into solid form.  Boots.  Coat.  Scarlet gloves, near-violet for a second as the blue fire melted into them.  Flowing chains.  
  
Face.  Unmasked and as unruffled as if Goro had just asked for a refill in Leblanc.  
  
That wasn't _right_.  That wasn't how it should look, his conscience should hate him-- _Akira_ should hate him, wasn't blowing his brains out enough to break that unaffected mask?!  Why was he just staring at Goro as if he didn't care, as if he was one of those oblivious self-absorbed little people who _couldn't see what Goro was_?  
  
Why was his conscience like this?  
  
"Why don't you blame me?" Goro shouted.  "You walk into my dreams, you beg me to heal, you got me a third Persona to use-- and you just float there with that calm look on your face!  _Why aren't you trying to hurt me_?!"  
  
Silence.  The... _Akira_... tilted his head, nonexpression softening, and inhaled one raspy breath.  "It's my nature," he replied, a whisper like a gunshot.  
  
No.  No, it couldn't be.  He was part of Goro, Goro wasn't _like_ this.  He never had been, not even as a small child before the orphanage... he clearly remembered hitting other children for taking his toys.  He wasn't... whatever the word for this was.  
  
Soft.  
  
People didn't look at him like that.  _He_ didn't look at himself like that.  
  
"Stop it," he muttered, a hand raising to his face.  Dampness soaked into his gloves as if they weren't even there.  "Stop--" He could still see Akira's expression, through the gaps between his fingers.  "Stop looking at me like that."  That cracked, blazing warmth, as unreadable as some sun-baked tablet's ancient calligraphy... it could be the darkest curse or a call to battle, a tale of blood-soaked triumph, a prayer placating some terrible god...  
  
It looked almost like the true Sayuri.  And the meaning of the flower named...  Was this what hatred looked like unmasked, then?  
  
Wasn't this what he wanted?  
  
Slowly, Goro let his hand fall.  This was what he needed.  To stare full into the face of someone... something... that knew what he was, something that didn't want the weapon... something that would _judge_.  
  
He dragged his head up and met Akira's eyes.    
  
"Well?" he asked after a long moment without so much as a questioning eyebrow from the Persona.  "I murdered you.  I framed you for murder twice over -- your principal just didn't make headlines.  I could go out and arrange an accident for every last one of your friends..."  Not that it had occurred to Akechi until he said it.  "It would be so easy to have a gas leak, or botulism in a batch of coffee, that just _tragically_ happened to catch a group of teenagers at a local cafe--"  
  
He hit the wall hard enough to see stars.  
  
"Such a _shame_ ," Akechi wheezed past Akira's grip on his throat, "that the incompetent cafe owner underheated the water."  
  
"What do you _want_?" Akira hissed.  
  
This.  Exactly this.  That fury pulling Akira's face into familiar lines, the grip that would leave weeks of bruising in reality... That recognition of Akechi as a monster, untainted by the terror of facing his own mortality.  
  
 _Truth_.  
  
Chains rattled at the darkening edges of Akechi's vision.  
  
 _It seems Akechi hates himself as much as he thinks I should hate him._  
  
 _I feel as though I understand him better now..._  
  
Black.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
One of Wakaba Isshiki's eyes was missing.  
  
Not that this seemed to deter the red-beaked crow perched on her head, its weight pressing her face deeper into the gory mud that spread for miles and was trickling up into Goro's ear.  It pecked searchingly into the socket, getting only a lock of dark, bloody hair jammed further in for its trouble, then ruffled its feathers huffily and went for her broken glasses.  
  
The glasses were probably a better meal than what Goro's own crows were getting.  The mass of them pecking sharply in his guts just kept getting clattering gears and breaking springs with tiny squeals of distressed metal, tossing them aside like a localized shower of clock parts.  
  
Maybe the heavy clouds overhead would open up.  He could use a good rusting, and then maybe with all the oily blood washed out of his body the birds would go find better hunting grounds than his own.  Or at least scavenge one of the other corpses in it.  Kobayakawa would be a good one, he had plenty of meat on him and had allowed rape in his school.  
  
A shadow fell over him, and the crows flew away in a cacophony of offended squawks.  One pointed boot nudged sharply at Goro's side.  
  
"Provoking a piece of humanity's unwanted desires made manifest was one of the stupidest things you've ever done," Akira said flatly.  
  
"You have far too high an opinion of me," Goro replied.  His guts lay flayed open to the sky, because of course they weren't clockwork until the crows pulled bits off.  "Did you really have to enter this dream?  Now I'm going to remember it."  
  
"You and me both," Akira muttered.  "Get up, I can't talk to you like this."  
  
"Oh, incentive."  _To stay in the mud_ , he didn't need to add.  Under Akira's withering look, though, Goro began pulling his internal organs back into place so he could sit up.  They stayed in place when he did, gravity irrelevant to the wound, and his hunting coat was intact enough to cover the viscera when he stood.  "Happy now?"  
  
"Thrilled."  
  
They set out walking across the battlefield, mud squelching underfoot.  There were no pyres, no walking wounded or field medics gathering up casualties, no undertakers collecting the dead.  No one had survived the war... except Goro, and Akira.  And the crows.  
  
Goro knew every livid face they passed.  
  
Eventually, Akira murmured, "There are so many."  
  
"Shido had a lot of enemies."  And even more collateral damage.  The subway crash, with its hundreds of wounded and dozens dead, wasn't the first of its kind.  "Don't worry, they'll have their justice in the end."  
  
"Is that why you provoked me?"  
  
Mm.  When had he done that?  "A momentary lapse in judgement," Goro said.  It must've been.  Akira would have his justice done too, but only if Goro managed to survive that long.  "It won't happen again."  
  
Akira huffed.  "Would you really kill the team?"  
  
"It won't be necessary."  
  
"Then _why did you threaten to do it_?"  
  
Goro stopped in his tracks.  "It isn't obvious?" he asked.  "So that you would treat me properly."  
  
"... You just want me to hate you?"  
  
"Well.  I did kill you, after all."  Goro smiled.  "Justice must be served."  
  
The dream faded with Akira shaking his head in bewilderment.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Akechi resolved to never pass out in Mementos again.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Sunday, Akechi had a free day.  No interviews, no shift at the station, no jobs for Shido, no ordinary cases.  He didn't even have homework, since he'd done it all in a binge to exhaust himself to a dreamless sleep after his idiocy in Mementos.  
  
He emptied his briefcase of paperwork and headed out to make the rounds of vending machines.  Not that he could get any from the station, much less Yongen-Jaya or Shuujin Academy, but google had brought up a dozen more vending machines scattered through Akihabara, Roppongi, and Suidobashi.  There was even one in the arcade on Central Street, which he went to last so that he would blend in with the teens out spending their own free day to the fullest.  
  
The briefcase hung heavy in his hand, packed completely full, as he headed back down into Shibuya station, only for his phone to ring before he could reach the turnstiles.  
  
 _Tojo Hideki_ , his caller ID read.  
  
Shido.  
  
Akechi stepped off to the side, around a corner and out of the flow of traffic, and put his back to the wall as he accepted the call.  
  
" _Moshi moshi, Akechi_."  
  
"Sir."  Akechi imagined a smile without actually making it, to keep his voice light and accepting.  "To what do I owe the pleasure?"  
  
" _Why, I wanted to congratulate you on another successful interview_ ," Shido replied.  The little thrum of pleasure at even this bit of acknowledgement, mere formalities before getting to business, made Akechi's stomach tighten uneasily.  " _The public loves you_."  
  
"Every media outlet is vouching for the inevitable Prime Minister Shido."  Imagined smile, his plan was coming to fruition, only seven days left.  "The public loves you too."  
  
" _We've only made it this far thanks to you_."  
  
"I'm honored to hear that."  
  
" _Now then._.." Pleasantries over.  " _I have a favor to ask of you_."  
  
Of course he did.  Though, a 'favor' at this late stage?  "What might that be?"  
  
" _It's about the loyal customers of our mental shutdown business_."  Akechi blinked at that.  Shido was daring to say it aloud on a cellular call?  Shido continued, " _How about you dispose of all the ones you think suspicious?_ "  
  
What?!  "Right at this moment?" Akechi blurted.  This was a test.  This had to be a test.  All the ones _he_ found suspicious, not Shido?  "But the election is coming up soon."  
  
" _Correct.  The earlier the better_."  
  
"Why so suddenly?"  What was going on?  "Did... something happen?"  
  
" _Nothing in particular_."  Then why...?  " _But if something were to happen_ ," Shido's voice darkened, " _it would already be too late_."  
  
At this late date?  There wasn't enough of a scandal or divided electorate for anything to sway the election away from Shido now.  What was he thinking?  "I can understand why you might be nervous," Akechi tried, "but why not stay calm and hold off until after the election?"  
  
" _I'd like to take out all of the trash before my inauguration as prime minister of this nation_."  That made very little sense.  " _For the sake of absolute victory_ ," oh.  That did.  " _I need all roots of anxiety to be pulled as soon as possible._ "  Akechi opened his mouth to reply, but Shido finished with, " _Including those damn phantom thieves_."  
  
No.  
  
 _No._  
  
 _Would you really kill the team_ , Akira had asked.  
  
It won't be necessary.  Because he'd put Shido off.  Because it was all going to be over in just another week.  
  
"... I thought we'd agreed that their sudden deaths would be a bit much."  
  
" _Do you think I'm an idiot, Akechi?_ " Shido snapped.  " _I had more important things to deal with that night than your childish 'mercy', but that ends here!  Just do as I ask!  I'll be counting on you_."  
  
The dial tone began to beep.  
  
Akechi stared at it.  So.  That was... it.  "... This is all too sudden," he murmured, in case any of Shido's men were watching.  
  
He couldn't do it.  
  
He wouldn't.  
  
... He... _wouldn't_ kill for Shido again.  
  
This was his last week to live.  
  
He hit the app, and managed to let Mementos materialize around himself before he broke down into wild laughter.  
  
 _I am going to die._  
  
 _I won't kill any more of them.  No more of Akira's friends.  No more._  
  
 _I am refusing Shido._  
  
His heart surged in his chest, and the silence of Mementos began to ring with the memory of distant chains.  
  
 _I,_ something hoarse in his heart said, _refuse to kill another innocent._  
  
He yanked at his mask, barely able to get Akira's name out in the gasping breaths between hysterical peals of laughter.  
  
 _I am thou.  Thou art I.  And we SHALL NOT KILL_.  
  
"SHRIVE!"


	4. Chapter 4

Giggling hurt.  
  
Propped upon Akira's lap, the tip of the dagger sticking bloodlessly out of his heaving chest and foamy drool trickling down his neck -- not blood, it should be blood but he wasn't coughing anything up -- Goro watched his new Persona form out of fire before his eyes and could. not. stop. _giggling_.  
  
This one, Huntsman, looked much more like a Robin Hood than Akechi's actual Robin Hood did, but one filtered through cyberpunk ninja instead of American superhero in shining spandex.  It held a bleeding heart in one armor-gloved hand, and somehow that was the most hilarious thing Goro had ever seen.  
  
Just.  A literal heart.  It wasn't even green, or writhing with tentacles, or laced with fiberoptic lights to go with the cyberpunk ninja thing Huntsman had going for it.  
  
Huntsman raised an eyebrow at them, then tucked the heart into a pouch at his hip and condensed into a copy of Goro's Fantome mask, which then merged with the one upon his face.  
  
Wind, attack buffs, Confuse.  Weak to gun, which made sense with the medieval fringes on his outfit, not that a Persona's looks were really much to go on a lot of the time.  
  
One last flare of light on his chest shone and vanished, and took Akira's blade with it.  The sudden, confusing lack of pain triggered another round of helpless laughter.  What even was his life.  He had another fairy tale in his heart and Shido was his _evil queen_ with the stupid _wimple_ and _ti-ti-ti-tiara_ oh gods he could not _breathe_.  
  
Goro's head rolled helplessly on Akira's shoulder through the laughter.  
  
He hadn't realized Personas were warm and solid to the touch.  He had no right to be here, burying his face into Akira's quickly-dampening collar.  But Akira had him braced with an arm across his chest, perfect for the backstab he'd delivered on command, and wasn't letting go.  
  
He couldn't catch his breath enough to ask Akira  
  
 _why._  
  
 _to stop._  
  
 _to let go._  
  
... anything.  
  
The world was ridiculous.  Akira was just letting him snicker and drool into his collar, and he had an entire Persona for refusing to murder on Shido's command, and he was going to die as soon as Shido noticed he wasn't killing anyone.  He had to...  
  
... run.  
  
... Well.  
  
It wasn't as if he had anything at his apartment to pack.  All his money, what little there was of it, was in his wallet, and his Persona costume had all his weapons.  He even had his briefcase full of SP sodas, in that odd cognitive pocket of holding that seemed to be part of the powers.  All that was left to do... was try to climb to the street and see if the Metaverse even spread out much from Mementos at all.  
  
Just as soon as he caught his breath.  
  
And unsummoned Akira.  Very important, that part.  The chains' fire would attract every Shadow in sight, that was why no one went around with their Persona just floating loose to get potshots taken at it.  
  
He'd unsummon Akira in just another minute.  
  
Just one more.  
  
Just... one.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
A half hour later, or so it vaguely felt like in the eerie time warp of the Metaverse, Akechi began his search for a way up to the street.  
  
For nearly two years, he had always used the app to leave Mementos.  So did the team, but he'd never had the chance to ask if they'd looked at the physical exits, as he had when he'd first discovered the place.  He rather suspected they hadn't, though, or they would've been far more leery of travelling deep.  Because, although you _could_ open the elevator doors with some effort, the car behind looked as though something from deep below had risen up and munched it.  It was little more than twisted, sheered-off metal plates hanging, rusted and cockeyed, from a ceiling jammed at an angle into the shaft.    
  
The stairs weren't in the same state, fortunately, but they had a certain visceral horror all their own.  He'd only peeked into the dark corner where the hallway to them should continue, and found fallen concrete pillars covered in a thick web of the flayed, arterial growths scattered patchily around the rest of Mementos.  
  
They were thicker now, denser, and covered more of the area, but he had to push through.  
  
Warily, he reached out to touch the things, ready to jerk back if they tried to grab him.  But the growths lay in quiescent, flesh-soft ropes under Akechi's gloved hands, and when he leaned forward to put his weight on them they only throbbed slowly and rhythmically.  (He didn't want to think heartbeat, he _really_ didn't want to think heartbeat, but... it was too overwhelmingly like that to call it something else.)  
  
He climbed over the first few fallen pillars, trying not to touch as best he could -- gloves and shoes, the pulse didn't really transmit through his sturdy soles -- but after the fourth there was only one way to go.  Crawling through.  
  
His clothing, even armored as it was, was too thin and fabric-like to avoid feeling those pulsing veins pressing up against his body.  Some were as thick as his arm, as he inched himself deeper; others were mere tendrils.  All of them were body temperature.  
  
You'd think a several-mile-long creature burrowed under an entire district of Tokyo would be hotter.  Or, perhaps, colder... ectothermic and long since in equilibrium with the soil.  
  
Akechi got hold of a bare piece of rebar and twisted to face downwards as he pulled himself under it.  A lucky break in the view let him see the bright yellow paint and rubber tread of a stairstep: so at least he'd managed to find the way up.  
  
Several of the tendrils hung in a loose curtain across a wider gap about a meter ahead, finger-thick this time and looking far too much like something he did not at all want to think about.  _Empathizing with Princess Mononoke right now.  Not pay-per-view anime schoolgirls.  Mononoke.  Futab--_  
  
 _Mononoke_.  
  
 _There had_ better _be an exit at the top_ , Akechi thought after what seemed to be another hour of trying not to feel molested.  (He mostly failed at that.)  Finally, though, he got one arm out into open air, and eeled out into a desolate copy of Station Square.  
  
The light was a sickly green, clouds low and lifeless in a way that had the hair on the back of Akechi's neck prickling with the need to get to cover.  His instincts had to be wrong, though: the windows of the building across the way were matte with grime, and there were great splashes of blood near the base of the walls and streaked across the cobblestone underfoot, too dark to have ever seen a drop of the kind of pounding rain and hail the sky was threatening.  
  
He stayed close to the walls as he edged out into the square.  The vintage streetcar that old Toranosuke gave speeches in front of was still there, doors warped closed and windows shattered.  He had to leave the streetcar's cover to circle past the spray of glass shards on the ground, so the windows had been broken from the inside... as if some _thing_ had just formed within it and long since escaped.  
  
Hopefully nothing new had formed or taken up residence since then.  Whenever that was.  It should be safe enough to use as cover, if Akechi was careful to glance up at its gaping holes as well as around, so he knelt at the corner of the streetcar and looked out over the square and the deeply-cracked Scramble, and considered the empty crossroads.  
  
If he went east, the next station on the line was Roppongi.  But that way also lay the Diet, and Shido's expensive apartment overlooking the Imperial Palace.  They'd search that way first, in case he was out to assassinate Shido.  
  
West was Yongen-Jaya.  No.  Just, no.  
  
North, though...  
  
People didn't look at the people who went to Shinjuku.  
  
Hopefully the Metaverse wouldn't peter out before he could get there.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
It didn't.    
  
There was a part of Akechi that almost wished it had.  Vast, jagged swathes of terrain over the five-kilometer walk were just... gone.  Not cracked like an earthquake or very oddly shaped sinkhole had occurred, but just... flattened, and in an eye-searing chaotic non-color that looked almost as if the world simply hadn't been rendered there, except so realistic that the human brain refused to comprehend what the bluescreening actually looked like.  
  
Those areas made something in Akechi stare needily at the parts of the Metaverse that were just a copy of reality.  The parts where the overpasses dripped with something that was very much not rainwater.  The parts where the train tracks became visible, and had occasional silhouettes -- none of them Shadows or the Mementos creatures that contained them, and some of them very, very small -- wandering single-mindedly towards Shibuya.  
  
He bypassed Shinjuku Station itself -- the real one was busier than Shibuya, the busiest in the world, and he did not want to see if something worse had burrowed in underneath it -- and circled around until he started to find the telltale signage of the red-light district.  Female silhouettes in high heels, anime maid girls, 24-hr DVD stores and lounges, everything just that slightest bit too seedy to be anything else... and here, it was all as filthy as the rest of the world, signs dark and ominous without any power to light up the neon.  
  
There was a gated storefront without any signs.  Just a set of stairs splashed with blood, and hinged bars so caked with grime they probably couldn't be moved anymore.  The end of the street pulled at his eyes with the promise of another crack in metareality... so unless he wanted to try to find another empty store, or, worse, an alley deeper in the red-light district... this was probably the best place he'd find to leave.    
  
Akechi reached for his phone and tapped the app.  
  
"Now returning to the real world," the MetaNav informed him calmly.  
  
Weight and air, light and noise... and a tea-blonde girl in purple jerking away from him so hard she nearly upset her little table.  A stool went clattering to the concrete.  
  
Crap.  He'd stepped out of the Metaverse nearly on top of someone.  
  
"You!" she choked out.  
  
And of course, it would have to be someone who recognized him from tv.  "I'm... sorry?" Akechi tried.  He had too many kinds of media smile, he needed to offer a different one... maybe if he just let one side of his mouth give the rueful one?  "I didn't mean to startle you--"  
  
Her face was paling even as she stared into his.  Then her gaze dropped to his gloved hands, and took on an alarming pallor.  
  
"Are you all right?  Miss--?" Goro reached out to catch her as she swayed.  
  
She took one sharp step forward and slapped him so hard his head hit the gate.  He stumbled and caught himself on the gleaming bars.  
  
"Don't you touch me," she snapped.  
  
... Girl barely older than Akechi, guy sneaks up behind her and makes a grab for her, red-light district.  Right.  Akechi decided not moving was his best option.  "I really didn't mean to startle you.  Or bother you at all.  I'm just passing by--"  
  
"Shut up."  
  
Akechi shut up.  
  
He watched, carefully motionless, as she stuffed a deck of bright red cards into a pocket under her dress, then pulled the cloth off her table and slung it around her shoulders like a very long shawl.  
  
"The cards think they're sooooo funny," the girl muttered as she snapped the table's legs up, folding and wedging the paired stools in under a set of stapled-in elastic straps.  "Ten of swords reversed... pops up right behind me..."  She shoved the flattened table between the bars of the security gate and jerked it just enough that, when it settled against the wall, it was at an angle that it looked like it couldn't get pulled back out.  "Fate of the world my aunt _fanny_..."  She grabbed him by the elbow, nails sharp enough that he could almost feel them through his coat, and yanked.  "Keep up."  And, barely giving him time to grab his briefcase, she headed down the street, away from the train station where surely the nearest koban was.  
  
"I really wasn't going to... you looked about to _faint_ \--"  
  
" _Dint I tell ya t'shaddup?_ "  
  
If she'd just let him explain before she dragged him into a koban.  Well, within sight of a koban.  As soon as he saw the sign, he'd yank free and run for it.  
  
Halfway up the block, she turned them sharply into the pink-tinted passageway to a bar, and all but kicked the door down.  
  
Goro was officially confused now.  
  
"MA'AM!" the girl hollered once inside.  "I need a fucking drink!"  
  
The bar's lone occupant, a heavyset, middle-aged okama in violet and gold kimono, gave them a dubious look and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke.  "'Ma'am'd in my own bar," she said in mock despair, even as she beckoned them to seats.  "Let's see some ID, then, missie."  
  
The girl tossed hers onto the bar, but Akechi shook his head and held up his free hand even as he gingerly sat down.  "Nothing for me."  
  
"You're underage anyway," the barmistress said.  "I'll get you water."  
  
"Really, no, I'm fine--"  
  
"Don't bother," the girl snarled.  "He doesn't _deserve_ anything."  Akechi stared at her in bewilderment.  "Shochu.  Whatever brand is cheapest."  
  
The barmistress raised an eyebrow at Akechi, a very pointed _what did you do?_ , but got out a tall brown bottle.  "You want it warmed, on the rocks, water-mixed...?"  
  
"Straight."  
  
"Oh, honey."  But she brought out a short glass and poured a few fingers into it.  "You want to talk about it?"  
  
" _No_."  She slammed back half the drink in one shot.  "Because there is _nothing to talk about_.  This... _person_ ," she kicked Akechi's chair, "is most certainly _not_ that boy Akira was mooning over for months."  
  
Goro choked on thin air.  
  
"Don't go outing the dead, missie," the barmistress said sharply.  "It's rude."  
  
"I am doing no such thing!"  She took another hefty gulp of alcohol under Goro's stunned stare, the bar's neon lights reflecting in tiny, sparkling glints from wet eyelashes.  "Because this person doesn't know Akira and wouldn't deserve him if he did.  He very much had _absolutely nothing_ to do with Akira's death."  
  
... The girl clearly meant exactly the opposite.  From the complete shock on the bartender's face, she knew that too.  
  
 _Shido's._  
  
 _They have to be Shido's.  The thieves didn't have anybody I didn't know about... and they still don't know I betrayed them either!_  
  
... Didn't they?  
  
"Well, now.  That's a very different matter than what I thought."  The okama took a long draw off her cigarette.  "You got a reason for dragging this perfectly innocent kid to my bar, then, honey?"  
  
The girl looked mournfully at her empty glass.  "The cards told me to," she grumbled.  "He's got an absolutely horrible fate if he tries to go on his own, and if it weren't for the fact it'd hit the rest of us I'd leave him to it, and nevermind that Akira always broke fate."  She huffed bitterly through her nose.  "Except for himself."  
  
The bartender blinked, then snapped her thick fingers.  "You're the fortune teller down the street.  Chihaya."  
  
Chihaya made a grumpy sound of agreement.  "Another."  
  
"I think not, honey.  Akira wouldn't want this for you."  
  
"Well he's not _here_ to tell me that!"  But Chihaya dug into her purse, brought out a wallet, and dropped several bills onto the counter in lieu of insisting on more alcohol.  Then, she twisted on her stool and jabbed one slender finger at Akechi's face.  Only his instinctive jerk back kept Chihaya from poking him in the eye.  "I will believe in you," she informed him, wet-eyed but with not so much as a hint of unsteadiness to her balance.  "I will expect you to break the chains of fate.  But only because Akira would, so there."  She raised her chin high.  " _I hate you_."  
  
And with that, she got up and swept from the bar with her shawl drawn tightly about her like a queen's cloak.  
  
Goro stared after her.  
  
So... that was open hatred.  
  
Why hadn't her expression looked anything like Akira's, then?  
  
He barely noticed the bartender taking the money and the glass, the clatter of glass in the sink and the ringing up of the sale, but then she set a housekey in front of him with a pointed little tink of metal on wood.  
  
"What...?"  
  
She pushed the register drawer closed with a sharp ka-chunk.  "Go straight up the stairs outside.  There's food in the fridge and bedding in the small closet between the kitchen and bath."  Goro stared.  "It's not much, but you can stay on my couch for a bit.  And to be frank, kid, you look beat.  We can hash out the details later."  
  
He wanted to take that key.  Just the promise of someplace to sleep... but... "I can't."  
  
One dramatically made-up eyebrow raised.  "You have the money for a hotel?"  
  
No.  He'd been expecting at least little Shadows in the surface world of the Metaverse.  Enough loose change added up.  
  
She seemed to read that in his face.  "And that's why.  Only two ways you're getting shelter for the night in this area, kid, and mine's the legal way."  Akechi barely managed to stifle a shudder.  He hadn't thought that far yet.  But... no.  Even if it wouldn't somehow get back to Shido within a matter of hours.  No.  "Just take the key and go."  
  
Akechi swallowed, but took the key and went.  
  
There was only one door at the top of the stairs, tinted as pink as the rest of the concrete by the Crossroads sign, with a mailbox up next to it.  14B, Ogyu Motoyuki.  
  
Not anyone in connection with Shido that he knew of.  But he didn't know much about the Cleaner's side of matters.  
  
If he was going to die at least it could be in his sleep.  
  
He unlocked the door and went inside.  
  
The place was... cozy.  Not like the coffeeshop's attic had been cozy, all worn wood and unwanted furniture and dust, but lived-in despite being scrupulously clean.  The promised couch, piled in colorful cushions and throw blankets, seemed to serve less as seating than as a backrest to the kotatsu next to it.  Said kotatsu was draped in a heavy pink quilt, and had several well-loved books and a tea caddy waiting for their owner to return.  
  
The walls were nearly invisible under the sheer number of photographs up.  Many of them had faded to orange tones, and these were the ones where a boy Goro's age was beaming at the camera with a makeup kit, or his hair just barely long enough to put into tiny pigtails behind his ears, or standing in furisode next to a twenty-something okama with New Year's kanzashi in her hair.  
  
She looked so happy.  
  
Goro turned away from the pictures and began excavating the couch.  Bedding was, as promised, found in a tiny closet that was probably meant to be the kitchen's pantry, and had even more throw blankets in a rainbow of summer colors next to the towels and sheets.  There weren't any extra pillows that he could find, though, so Goro stuffed the floppiest and least ornamented one from the couch into a pillowcase.  
  
Goro slid his briefcase behind the couch, folded up his coat and set his belt and gloves on it, and lay down to sleep.  
  
It seemed like only a few minutes later when someone tapped his shoulder, and he woke to blazing light behind a broad shadow.  "Nngh."  Ow.  What was the mailbox name.  "Ogyu-san?"  
  
"It's Lala-chan, kid.  Nobody calls me Ogyu but the government."  
  
"... Lala-chan.  My apologies."  Akechi slowly sat up, glancing around for a weapon or yakuza, but only finding Lala.  And a clock behind her that read 5:43 am.  "Am I in your way?"  
  
Lala, in pink sweats and with her makeup scrubbed off to show a five-o-clock shadow, blinked at him.  "Of course not, kid.  Dinner's up."  
  
... Dinner?  "You really didn't have to--"  
  
"Thought you might like it while it's fresh."  She settled heavily down next to the kotatsu, letting Akechi see that, yes, there were two trays set out, omurice and soup and tea steaming.  "And I'm heading to bed as soon as the dishes are done, so it's time we hashed out the details."  
  
It was only a lifetime of hiding the flinch that let Akechi settle easily down on the cushion before his own tray.  "... I see.  Ittadakimasu."  He could probably stomach tea for this conversation, he thought, and sipped carefully.  
  
Lala mercifully didn't demand he eat in a different order.  "You see, kid, I ain't running a charity here."  They never were.  Even foster families getting paid to put up with Akechi weren't 'running charities'.  "So I'll pay you to clean the bar in the early mornings," Lala continued.  
  
It took three bites of Lala digging into her omurice for what she'd actually said to fully register.  "... Pay?" Goro echoed.  Pay _money?_ But...  
  
Lala swallowed.  "You've got two weeks until I start docking pay for rent and food.  That should give you enough for a couple nights' buffer if you need a ticket outta Tokyo."  
  
Goro set his tea down with a near-silent clink, both hands tight on the hot ceramic.  Food, and a place to sleep, and actual money for a legitimate chore...  
  
His eyes burned, and the tea wavered in his vision.  "Why are you doing this?" he asked, the words scraping in his throat.  "You know I killed someone."  
  
"I know you killed my cute little dishwasher," Lala corrected tiredly.  "But, honey, you don't get to be as old as me in this business if you judge people wrong."  She rested her head on one hand.  "I've seen too many kids die in the gutter.  Let me save just one."  
  
There was really nothing Goro could say to that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- a wimple is the white head covering the Evil Queen wears in Disney's Snow White  
> \- shochu is a distilled alcoholic beverage stronger than sake but weaker than vodka, and can be made from well over half a dozen different things  
> \- I love you Lala-chaaaaan and I have no idea if "okama" is at all a polite word. ilu anyway!  
> \- kotatsu: large low table with a heating element built into the bottom, to be draped with a quilt and used for warm seating in winter


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pater - Latin for "father"

Living at Lala-chan's was... numbing.  
  
Every morning at 5:30 am, she would tap him awake and they would eat a meal together -- Goro's breakfast, Lala-chan's dinner -- in tired silence.  Lala's cooking was simple, rice and a couple of basic sides, and there wasn't enough space at the sink for her to bother making him help wash.  
  
By 6:30, he started work in the bar.  It looked more run-down under the bright lights meant for cleaning, every scuff on the chairs and chip in the tile floor starkly visible, than it did in Lala's business-hours mood lighting.  
  
Cleaning was mindless.  Cleaning was good.  Mopping, wiping down the counters and tables, putting the chairs to rights... doing dishes that he was fairly sure were piled higher than she would normally ever allow...  
  
That first morning, Goro took down the private party room's sparkling gold curtains and spent a good hour wiping old dust gently out of the hems, then took down the rod and polished that, then did the doorway and floor before putting it all back up.  The next day he went for the corners of the ceiling, behind the mood lighting, and down by the baseboards.  The third, he took down every bottle of expensive alcohol on display and scrubbed the shelves pristine.  It left him feeling grimy and smelling faintly of lemon and bleach, but it filled the time.  
  
Around 10, he returned upstairs, changed back into his borrowed sleeping yukata -- navy with pink flowers, and so large on him that he had to use a safety pin to keep the collar from gaping, because if he wrapped the skirt tightly enough to keep the collar closed he would end up sitting on the front flaps and not be able to walk -- and put his clothes in to wash while he took a nap.  
  
3 pm had Lala getting up, and he bathed while she cooked again, then she went off to work, leaving him with nothing but her tv and a shelf full of romance novels.  Which, no, just no, Goro was not reading those.  Which left the tv.  
  
It had been years since Goro had nothing to do but watch tv.  He quickly found almost everything he'd ever loved intolerable.  Sentai shows, evening anime... Detective Conan's kind, uncorrupted police made Goro's stomach twist bitterly, and he managed all of two sentences about the constant nonsense with the girlfriend before he changed the channel.  Even the movies on tv were unbearable with how they all seemed to be heartwarming December specials.  
  
The news didn't even deserve a thought.  
  
Late Friday night, Goro brought out his wallet and carefully counted through his week's pay.  25,000 yen.  If he dared look for a thrift store, he could spend 2000 of that and still afford...  
  
Who was he kidding.  Shido's cronies had to be watching hotels and public transit, and he wasn't old enough to rent a car or motorbike, even if he knew how to drive either.  
  
Which left, did he dare go to a thrift store and buy a disguise, on the off chance of getting caught before he left for the Diet, or did he forego that and hope to run fast enough to reach Shido's Palace before the inevitable lackeys haunting the stations nearest the Diet got hold of him?  
  
.... or....  
  
_No_ , every fiber of his body cried out in revulsion.  
  
But what if.  What if he stepped off the train and hit the app immediately?  What if he escaped into the Metaverse inside Kokkaigijido-mae or Nagatacho stations, stepped out of it at the Diet, and went straight into Shido's Palace?  There was absolutely no reason for the Metaverse to be underwater at the Diet, if you didn't approach it from inside Shido's Palace.  In fact, it couldn't be: the courthouse where Sae's Palace had been was less than a block away.  
  
But the splashes of blood.  The sickly green clouds.  The wandering silhouettes that weren't Shadows.  The splits in reality.     
  
Akechi shivered.  
  
But.  
  
Tomorrow was his last chance at Shido.  And Shido had to die.  He just had to.  For Goro's mother.  For the people he'd had Goro kill.  For the phantom thieves.  
  
For Akira.  
  
He could walk one block of that bloodstained world for Akira.  
  
... _No_...  
  
Yes.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
"Don't do this, Goro."  
  
Goro brushed bloodspray from his face and turned to look at Akira, clinging white-knuckled to the rusted chains that were holding Goro to the raft beneath them, jouncing across ash-choked rapids.  "Oh.  You again."  
  
"Me again," Akira agreed.  "Don't you have any _nice_ dreams?"  
  
"This is nice."  He didn't even feel the chains piercing through him.  And the bodies in the water weren't moving or looking at him.  
  
Akira's face crumpled.  
  
"Just sit back and relax."  Goro's teeth clacked together as the raft bounced across one of the corpses in the water with a sickening squelch.  "We've almost reached the sea."  
  
"Please, you can't kill him.  Just send a card and take the Treasure," he begged.  "It will work."  
  
"There's only one way to go."  And Goro looked back downstream, where the bodies all seemed to tumble over the edge of the world.  "You might not want to stay for this part."  
  
" _Goro!_ "  
  
Akira's cry echoed in Goro's ears as he soared into oblivion over the edge of the falls.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Goro woke to Lala tapping him awake.  "Good morning," she said gruffly, with a tired smile.  "The fortune teller brought you a care package.  It's next to your breakfast."  
  
"A... what?"  Goro rubbed at his dry face, feeling none of the tackiness of dried blood or ashes.  Dammit.  And Akira had been so _polite_ about staying out of his dreams this week.  
  
But there was indeed a dark gray messenger bag sitting on the table next to his rice and fish, well-worn canvas fat and full.  The curvature seemed to indicate something soft, so it wasn't books, or anything in a box...  
  
... _Chihaya_ had sent this?  
  
Goro slithered from the bed to thump heavily on his floor cushion.  Why.  How could.  But.  
  
"Well?" Lala prompted.  "I've been dying to see what it is all night."  
  
Slowly, Goro opened the bag, pulling the contents out.  A pair of baggy cargo jeans.  A medium-gray zip-up hoodie.  A knit winter hat, purple and black striped and done in a knobbly-textured yarn.  A pair of aviator glasses with the lenses tinted a subtle grayish green.  All of it was clearly secondhand, except for the glasses, and distinctly something Detective Prince Goro Akechi would never wear.  
  
Goro wouldn't have to risk himself going to a thrift store, or being obviously himself to get to the Diet.  Or enter the Metaverse until he reached the Palace.  
  
It was the kindest gift he'd ever gotten in his life.  
  
"But... she hates me," Goro murmured plantively.  
  
Lala's expression softened.  "She doesn't need to like you to help you."  
  
Goro mulled over that throughout the rest of breakfast.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Akechi maintained his routine that day after recieving Chihaya's package.  Clean the bar.  Put his dirty clothes in the machine.  Nap.  Breakfast with Lala.  Bath.  Put on the new-old clothes Chihaya had sent, though without the beanie or glasses so Lala could pretend he was staying home.  And then Lala sashayed off to open the bar, and Akechi pulled his briefcase out from behind the couch for the first time in nearly a week.  
  
All his SP sodas sat in perfect rows, eighteen total.  The messenger bag had similar dimensions to his briefcase, but it was just canvas: it wouldn't be able to take the weight of them all.  
  
... The last four, however, fit perfectly in the pockets of his cargo jeans and hoodie.  
  
Beanie to cover his hair.  Glasses to change the shape of his face and the coloring of his eyes and brows.  (Chihaya was _thorough_.)  Hood up.  Phone in his pocket with one of his sodas.  
  
Shoes on.  
  
Akechi dropped Lala's key into her mailbox and headed out to commit his one final murder.  At last.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
So of course it all went wrong before he'd even passed the second station on the way to the Diet.  
  
The overhead speakers crackled in the middle of the tunnels, far too early to be the ninety-second warning of the next station, then squealed loudly with microphone feedback.  
  
Akechi, as well as every other passenger on the train, glanced up.  
  
The small tv screens inset among the advertisement strip, above the windows and doors, were blaring with static under the Phantom Thieves' unmistakable logo.  
  
No.  No, that was impossible.  
  
After a good ten seconds to catch the attention of all the passengers, the logo winked out, and a backlit silhouette appeared, sitting behind a desk.  
  
Queen.  
  
"We are the ones you know as the Phantom Thieves," she announced, voice electronically distorted but still icier than Akechi had ever heard from her sister, even at Sae's worst.  "And we request a moment of your time.  
  
"The recent scandals that have broken confidence in our government.  The deadly and destructive accidents caused by psychotic breakdowns and mental shutdowns.  The public poll's selection and live-broadcast death of CEO Okumura.  The _assassination_ of our leader.  
  
"One man is behind every single instance."  
  
The train slowed to a stop at a station.  No one in the car moved.  
  
"That man," Queen continued, "was afraid his crimes would be exposed, and shifted the blame onto us.  He corrupted the police.  The media.  The internet.  
  
"That man is--"  
  
The screen went to off-the-air stripes, getting startled, dismayed noises from the passengers, but then Queen's silhouette blinked right back up five seconds later.  
  
"That man," she repeated, the video looping back, "is the cabinet minister of state for special affairs, Masayoshi Shido."  
  
Shido's face flashed up onto the screen, a flat stare against a white background that evoked a mug shot all too well.  
  
"We have spent the last three weeks preparing for you.  
  
"We did not disband.  
  
"We did not vanish.  
  
"We did not _break_ ," Queen's voice hissed.  "We are coming for your blackened, shriveled heart, Shido."  
  
The video returned to her backlit silhouette.  
  
"For the rapes and the murders," she said, leaning forward and pushing herself up slowly, looming larger on the tiny screen.  "For the human trafficking, the drugs, the extortion, the bribes and blackmail and scapegoats.  For the child you turned into your personal assassin."  Shock turned Akechi's knees to water.  "For our leader, whom you had tortured and murdered in the bowels of police headquarters itself.  
  
"We will find you.  We will end you.  You will confess to all the crimes you've committed with your own mouth."  
  
She paused.  "Please look forward to it."  
  
The screen turned itself off.  
  
The entire car burst into chatter, but Akechi didn't hear any of it.  
  
The Mementos-like cases turning themselves in to the station.  
  
Shido's sudden paranoia.  
  
Unmistakable blonde pigtails glimpsed out of the corner of his eye as he passed the Diet.  
  
The team had continued their work.  Akira's death had _martyred him_ , not _broken them_.  There'd been... no point to killing him.  Nothing but Shido's ego and inability to stand the slightest shred of interference.  
  
And since you didn't need a calling card to kill a Shadow... they were going to steal the Treasure.  They wouldn't wait until tomorrow.  They _couldn't._   Not when Shido would have every last one of his people out in force hunting for teenagers associated with the cases outside Shuujin Academy.  
  
They were already there, at the Diet and in the Palace, _now_.  
  
Under Akechi's feet, the train swayed and rattled.  
  
They were going to take the Treasure.  Even Akira's death didn't make them want to... they weren't going to kill Shido's Shadow.  They were going to let him live.  
  
So they would never let Akechi kill him.  Not that he even could, now.  The world would blame the Phantom Thieves, possibly even when Akechi confessed.  The public had no idea what limits the Thieves had.  So why wouldn't Shido's cronies plant the idea that they could make someone _lie?_ And then they could keep Akechi as someone else's pet assassin.  
  
But Akechi had to do something.  
  
He had to.  
  
He had to...  
  
_She doesn't have to like you to help you._  
  
_For the child you turned into your personal assassin._  
  
... He had to get into the Palace.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Kokkaigijido-mae station was jammed with stunned, chattering people rewatching the broadcast on their phones, and the streets above were little better.  The front of the Diet itself had a crowd nearly six deep in front of the gates, all yelling over each other so Akechi couldn't tell what they were saying, much less whose side they were on or if they were all on the same side themselves.  
  
He crossed the street at the intersection there, 'avoiding' the crowd, then went to cross the street that pointed directly at the Diet's gates.  Halfway across, he hit the app.  
  
Reality wavered.  Darkened.  And dropped him right next to the anchor post at the bow of the ship.  The deck, all the way back to the gates and up the steps into the Diet, was empty.  They were already inside.  
  
Akechi exhaled slowly, his fist coming to rest over his sternum.  The sternum that should've been broken twice over already, his heart sliced clean through... the heart that was pounding fast in his throat, pulse racing as his fingertips traced upwards and found the edge of his mask, power starting to burn in his veins.  
  
Shido was not going to die.  
  
The Phantom Thieves were two fighters down.  
  
"Akira?"  
  
He closed his eyes, hearing the rush of fire and chains that heralded the Persona.  
  
Heart in his throat, Goro cupped the power and let it flow into his mental hands, feeling out the shape of it until the words came.  
  
_I..._  
  
The voice was slow, halting like it hadn't been used much.  
  
_We._  
  
The volume wavered.  Partial deafness, perhaps, if Goro had been hearing a person.  
  
_We want... Pater, Pater will hate us, but we_ want...  
  
I _want... to help._  
  
_I am thou._  
  
"Shrive."  
  
Akira's dagger didn't seem to hurt as much, this time.  A blade of hot pain where there shouldn't be any, but it felt more like a sudden cramp than the blood-choked carving that had brought Le Fantôme out.  Akechi was able to watch the new Persona form from fire and shreds of darkness.  
  
It took on a hunched shape, something broad-shouldered and heavy-armed.  Some sort of gorilla...?  But the legs were too long, and the head oddly misshapen, and then the intricate crenellations of a Gothic balcony formed under its feet.  
  
Quasimodo.  Not quite Disney's, but close, just with more concealing clothing and a ragged hood.  Strike, defense buffs, fear.  
  
It gave Akechi a hopeful, shy smile, and faded out, taking Akira and his dagger with it.  
  
Akechi smoothed down the front of his coat, feeling the burn in his chest fade away, and headed in.  
  
The Diet's doors were open, and no doubt that was the thieves' route, but... Akechi didn't know the way.  Not that it mattered.  Once he set foot on the steps, the white-limned, questioning abyss of a teleport rose at his fingertips.  _Yes, I want to go to the safe room._  
  
The abyss always made him blink when it swallowed him whole, leaving the distinct impression that the safe room had just snapped closed around him like a cartoon box monster.  He checked his pockets quickly: SP sodas, gun in the holster, lightsaber at his hip, armor undamaged and firmly closed.  HP and SP maxed.  
  
Time to face them all.  
  
The short hallway and single staircase down held a note of alarm in the air, like an icy wet finger trailing over the rim of the wine glass of one's soul.  Whether it was Shido's or Akechi's own, Akechi couldn't tell... but the shiver thrumming in erratic pulses through his soles and the door handle under his palm, that was all too real.  They were already fighting the Shadow.  
  
And then Akechi stepped into the little balcony room, and peered past the curtains, only to discover he was no longer on a balcony at all.  Though that was unimportant.  The hideous golden lion made up of human bodies, twice as tall as a man and topped with a billowing red flag: _that_ was important.  That was...  
  
... that was _Shido's Shadow_ enthroned atop the lifeless, beseeching arms, wearing a helmet like the divine crown of the Statue of Liberty and with a cape screaming military superhero.  
  
No.  This was no more monstrous than Madarame's art, than Okumura's space villain, than Kobayakawa's pampered pet or the SIU Director's living chess board.  He'd seen Shadows carried about by entire harems of naked slave women like barbarian kings, big-game hunters with necklaces of human heads, people trailing children like mindless robotic clones of themselves.  How could Shido not be worse?  
  
How could the man who ordered Akira's death be just a normal Shadow?  
  
The Shadow hissed at another of Fox's Bufudynes, and Akechi shook off his shock.  Fight now.  Horror later.  
  
Akechi slipped past the curtains and started pulling himself up the thick carvings around the lintel.  He didn't dare leap, not with his back turned and the team needing no sudden distractions of movement while they were fighting for their lives.  
  
Another hit, this one with the telltale _ching_ of a physical block, and Oracle yelped.  "Skull's down!  Someone help him!"  
  
Freidyne sizzled into life, its boom covering the snap when Akechi's foot broke off a piece of the carved wood.  But he had the lip of the ledge above, and managed to find another toe hold.  
  
"You lowlifes."  Shido chuckled coldly, as Akechi slowly, breath screaming in his lungs, pulled himself onto the ledge.  The ceiling curved away from him, opened as if hinged, all violet and gold stained glass and that disgusting cartooned eye.  "I hope you understand what it means to turn your back on me!"  
  
Death.  But Akechi wasn't dead yet.  
  
"I don't wanna understand!" Oracle snapped.  
  
"Then you shall perish!  You shall regret these foolish actions... in the afterlife!"  The lion leapt into the air, a sphere of shredded ribbons of shadow whirling around it, only to burst out as a winged version of itself.  " _I will destroy you!_ "  
  
They couldn't see it from their angle, but Akechi could-- Shido grinned, bloodthirsty and mad with triumph.  And if they couldn't see him, they couldn't hit him.  
  
Except... Akechi could.  
  
Someone below cast Samarecarm, which meant they'd all have their defenses up and trained on Ryuji for the five seconds he needed to get up.  
  
"Quasimodo!"  He would savor the memory of Shido's complete shock forever.  "Negative Pile!"  Quasimodo tore a massive chunk of intricately-carved stone railing from his own balcony and pegged it straight at Shido's helmeted head.  
  
_Gods_ that felt good.  Even with the breathtaking pulse of sourceless pain that the move thumped through his body.  Ow.  
  
"I don't expect to be forgiven," Akechi called down, even as Shido and his winged lion reeled in the air, "but is there room in this party for one more?"  And, without giving them a chance to answer, he dove into the fight.  Blow after blow rained upon Shido, down from Akechi and up from the team, but Shido gave nearly as good as he got... but now his attention was split in two directions, and he kept hitting the team as the more obvious threat from sheer numbers.  Too bad for him that half of them knew healing spells and they all carried healing items.  
  
"Why won't you stop resisting?" Shido growled before Akechi found out if they would bother to heal him if he needed it.  "The nation I strive for is the ultimate realization of the public's happiness!"  
  
Happiness.  
  
Akechi saw red.  
  
_Happiness?_ Akira lay _dead_ , frozen and rotting in the morgue on _this man's orders_ , and he _dared claim that?!_  
  
The lion turned into a pyramid of the golden statues, crowned with Shido's helmet, and Shido's voice buzzed senselessly into Akechi's ears.  
  
Happiness.  
  
_Burn alive in your fucking golden tomb._ "Le Fantome!" Akechi roared.  "Agidyne!"  
  
He hit and hit, Le Fantome's fire and Huntsman's wind, Quasimodo hurling stones like they were each torn from Akechi's heart, an attack buff on the team when one threw a healing spell in ribbons of pink-tinged light across his vision.  
  
"Useless ignorant masses!"  His target was on the floor.  His target was between him and  
  
\-- _my team, be careful_ \--  
  
Akira's team.  
  
Akechi leapt to the ground, circling around to get the team out of the line of fire as they berated Shido's Shadow like it was defeated.  Which it wasn't: the damn thing swept off its cape, revealing a spring-loaded harness and going super-Saiyan on the lot of them.  Nothing seemed to do much, even after it voice-buzzed more and Hulked right out of its harness, but hitting it still felt...  
  
\-- _my team_ \--  
  
... He hadn't been watching the team.  
  
A bit of the red cleared from Akechi's vision, the rushing in his ears fading enough that he could hear murmuring.  Whimpering.  
  
Despair.  
  
How long had they had it on?  Akechi met Skull's stricken eyes.  Skull, who didn't have those spells, who didn't have those items, who'd hated Akechi with a dog's innate sense of evil from the moment they'd met, and was now going to die with him because...  
  
\-- _please_ \--  
  
... because...  
  
\-- _call me_ \--  
  
\-- _Goro_ please --  
  
... because Akechi was a coward.  No.  
  
He tore his eyes away from Skull's, stared at the yellow-eyed bloodlust savoring their terror, their dwindling lives... and bared his teeth.  
  
"Akira!"  
  
"What?!" half the team yelped.  
  
"Energy Shower!"  The energy was joy, fierce and warm and as powerful as a tsunami, Akira bright teal and white in Akechi's heart.  He couldn't even quail at the stunned stares burning into him, or Queen's iron grip on his upper arm as the team rallied.  
  
"We will be discussing this later," she said.  
  
"I look forward to it," Akechi lied.  
  
Akira's relief powered Akechi through the rest of the fight, until Shido's Red-Hulk form collapsed onto its face and boiled away, leaving only Shido's true Shadow, bruised and defeated.  
  
"How could I... lose...?" it murmured to itself.  
  
Queen stepped forward.  "Masayoshi Shido."  The Shadow looked up.  "For causing countless mental shutdowns in others.  For rape, murder, and all your myriad crimes done in your unfathomable arrogance.  You will atone."  
  
The Shadow's eyes slid away from hers, landing upon Akechi.  "And him?"  
  
"That's none of your business."  
  
"Actually..."  Akechi was not going to let this creature keep even the slightest shred of hope that he could hide his crimes and simply... go on into his life with changed political policies to assuage his guilt.  He kept his hands pointedly away from his weapons and didn't move any closer.  "I always intended to turn myself in, once I'd ruined and killed Shido."  
  
" _You_ be quiet," Queen snapped, before turning back to the Shadow.  "Go back.  Confess your crimes.  And don't you _dare_ expect us to listen to your apologies, _ever_."  
  
"You killed our best friend," Skull growled.  "We ain't wasting any more fucking time on you."  
  
Shido bowed his head in silence.  
  
Above them, the shipwheel floating in the twilight sky flared brightly, then shrank and floated down to Panther's hand.  She snatched it out of the air, and bitterly said, "Let's go."  
  
They turned away, got a few steps towards the door, and behind them, Shido's Shadow grunted in pain.  Akechi spun just in time to see the Shadow stagger upright, flicker like a bad tv signal, and vanish.  Fuck.  Fuck.  "He's dead," Goro choked out.  
  
"What?!"  
  
"He's _dead!_ "  Goro grabbed the nearest pair of hands -- Noir and Queen -- and pulled them into a run for his safe room, and damn their struggles.  "The Palace is about to explode!"  
  
"Explode?!" Skull yelped.  
  
"Shadows die different than they return to their real selves."  Now was not the time for eloquence.  "Palaces collapse different at death than when a Treasure's stolen, too.  _Faster_."  He raced past the curtains and hit the door, thank god public doors had to open outwards for fire regs.  "I've got a safe room and the teleport is the last thing to go."  
  
Up the stairs, boots pounding and echoing on concrete.  Fall against the door when the Palace shook in an explosion, cling to the handle as the floor started to list underfoot.  
  
The safe room.  
  
The teleport.  
  
Eight feet hit the deck at a sharp angle, and they all fell in a jumble and began to slide.  
  
"Hit the app!" Akechi shouted. "Whoever can get their phone _hit it!_ "  
  
They all tumbled out onto reality, gravity heavy and December air icy and car-fumes-scented in Goro's nose.  And everything tinted faintly green: he'd forgotten about his disguise.  He stayed very still while everyone pulled themselves up off of him and sorted themselves out.  
  
" _You_."  Ann yanked him to his feet by a fist in the collar of his hoodie, twisting it tightly.  "You have a lot of explaining to do, you _rat bastard_."  
  
"I do," Akechi agreed, trying to sound as inoffensive as possible.  "But not here."  Not where they would all get stopped by the Diet's security -- or, worse, Shido's goons, who were probably still hunting around --  especially if things devolved into a fight as Akechi rather expected they would.  "Might I suggest Mementos?"  Because even as horrible as that place was, the entrance at least was enclosed and safe.  Nothing like the Metaverse outside.  
  
Ann's grip tightened.  She glanced at the rest of the group, then she shoved him stumbling free, roughly in the direction of the station.  "Move."  
  
Akechi moved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, Ryuji fans, yes I stole his big damn hero moment. But hey, he didn't get the "give us back our tears" beating (wtf Atlus), at least?


	6. Chapter 6

Mementos was still wavering into being around them when Skull clotheslined Akechi back onto a rusted turnstile.  " _You fucking asshole_."  
  
No need to guess what that was about.  "It's not him," Akechi managed to choke out past Skull's muscled arm.  
  
"Sure _looked_ like it," Skull snapped.  
  
"Skull."  Queen loomed behind the blond, tapping his elbow, and the pressure over Akechi's throat lessened without needing a word to order it.  "I wonder," she murmured.  "You and Oracle got the best look at it--"  
  
"Definitely Coffeebro," Oracle supplied curtly.  
  
"-- and certainly the _ace detective_ has had even more time to examine the evidence.  What theories has he come up with?"  
  
Akechi stared into her eyes, hoping to unnerve her before their dried-blood color did him.  "Do you really think I'm going to answer that?" he asked.  "You've no reason to believe a word I say."  So why he'd bothered saying it wasn't Ak-- Joker at all, he did not know.  
  
"Nope!"  He couldn't see Panther from where he was pinned, but he could very easily picture the hateful grin on her face to match the tone of her voice, even though he'd never seen something like it on her before.  "We have noooo reason to believe you at all."  
  
"It'll be very telling which option you pick, though," Queen said.  
  
Option?  What could Queen have come up with besides 'guilty conscience' and 'cruel joke of whatever ancient god had given them the app and the power'?  ... He was not about to admit to either of those.  None of these naive idiots understood true guilt, for all that he'd needled Niijima about being a pushover (oh, for the days when that was _true_ ), nor did they understand sacrifice.  
  
... Although...  Akechi let his face relax into its mildest, pained media expression.  "I suppose that whatever terrible being gave us these powers and the app to use them with... could be playing a joke."  
  
Ow ow _ow_ oxygen, and this turnstile really wasn't made to have someone's spine bent over it.  Another tap as spots started darkening Akechi's vision, and Skull let up just enough for Akechi to catch a breath.  
  
"That one, I hadn't come up with yet," Queen mused.  "My initial thoughts, in fact, were that he was either a trophy or a guilty conscience."  Akechi bared his teeth at her.  "But then, I considered how very little Robin Hood made sense in context, unless he was capable of stealing from the rich... say, a Wild Card power from the sole member of our group with an embarrassment of riches in his Personas."  
  
What.  
  
That wasn't what-- Robin Hood was about going up against a _selfish unqualified bastard of a tyrant_ , not-- what the _fuck_ Niijima!  How _dare_ she pervert Robin Hood and Akira like that!  
  
"Hm.  Either I'm very close, or you'd never even considered it."  Steel and stone and so much like Sae, like all the worst bits of Sae that weren't from her stupid Palace and the distortions of Japan's rigged society.  Makoto should've stayed a stupid good-girl pushover under her sister's thumb _forever_.  "Still, even that's better than my fourth idea."  
  
How could it get worse.  
  
"You see, Akechi... we don't quite know how the psychotic breakdowns differ from the complete mental shutdowns and subsequent deaths caused by them."  Before he could muster a withering answer, she continued, "Of course we know the mental shutdowns themselves are caused by the death of the Shadow.  Morgana warned us about that immediately.  But the psychotic breakdowns, the ones that leave their victims broken but responsive afterwards?  Those can't be caused by the death of the Shadow."  
  
Yes, obviously, but all you had to do was enrage the Shadow past all sense and then escape.  
  
"However... what about capture of the Shadow?"  
  
What.  
  
"What?!" the rest of the team yelped.  Skull startled badly enough that Akechi was able to break his hold, though he only sat up, eyeing the team backing off defensively.  All of them except Queen.  
  
"And then, if you can capture the Shadow, what need do you have of the body?" she continued mercilessly.  "We've seen they manifest just fine without being tied to any one human.  Why wouldn't you be able to... cut someone's Persona loose and take it for yourself, and support it on your own life instead of their original owner's?"  
  
Akechi stared, aghast.  
  
"But something went wrong.  You didn't get Arsene, or the full roster of Joker's Personas.  Which would've been quite the haul, wouldn't it?  Only you didn't get some inhuman battle manifestation of a Shadow, like Madarame or Okumura's were, but someone who couldn't be disguised as anything but the person he was."  No.  No, impossible.  "You got _Akira himself_."  
  
No.  No, that was his _conscience_ , the manifestation of his idiocy--  
  
"Who else have you captured?  Do you even have any Personas of your own?"  
  
" _They're all mine!_ "  Akechi caught himself on the turnstile at the center of a ring of raised weapons.  "They aren't _people_.  Gods, Niijima.  I--"  He rubbed at his face.  "-- I have almost the same power he did.  I just only ever showed you one Persona.  _And I know they're all unique_ ," he spoke over her attempt to protest, "but it's not exactly the same.  I don't... entice Shadows to work for me."  How on earth did that even _work?_ It shouldn't, ever.  Hell, he'd seen Aki--Joker deliberately piss off a Shadow and then shoot it, and somehow it leapt to do his bidding and fawn over him.  What sort of insane being _did_ that?  "These are more like how actual Jungian psychological theory works.  A puzzle of select personal behaviors and traits mixed together as a mask for interacting with different situations."  
  
Eight skeptical stares.  
  
Oh, fuck it.  "Your second guess is right," Akechi admitted, crossing his arms.  "It's my guilty conscience."  
  
"Bullshit!"  
  
Akechi glared at Skull.  "Shut up.  It's hardly as though I want to admit to one."  
  
"Be that as it may," Queen said.  "We're going to have to judge that for ourselves.  Summon it."  
  
"What gives you the right--"  
  
"You killed him!" Panther yelled.  
  
... point taken.  But that still didn't give them any right to his... his torn and tattered psyche.  "I helped you with Shido and didn't give him your names.  Isn't that enough?" he asked, already knowing it wasn't.  
  
"Summon," Queen ordered.  "Now."  
  
"And don't even think about running," Oracle said.  "I've blocked your app."  
  
It hadn't occurred to him to run, but knowing he couldn't... was all lost in the emotional white noise anyway.  
  
Fine.  _Fine_.  Let them suffer looking into the face of his conscience.  "You asked for this," Akechi warned them, before ripping his mask off and viciously hissing, " _Akira_."  
  
He had the satisfaction of watching Queen's stony composure crack with grief as the Persona materialized.  _Good_.  Soft, choked-back sobs, a grunt like Skull had been sucker-punched, Mona's tiny, pathetic mewl... _You asked for this.  Choke on it_ , Akechi thought, refusing to look at the Persona hovering beside him.  
  
Fox stepped forward, well within range of a grab as he circled the Persona, the line of his shoulders stiff.  The Persona pivoted in place, the movement just barely visible out of the corner of Akechi's eye, and pulled away from him to let Fox pass between them, the burning chains as intangible as air.  
  
"My god," Fox finally murmured.  "It's him."  
  
Akechi's head snapped around.  "What?  No it's not."  Fox thumbed his sword to readiness with a _snick_.  "It's _not_.  It's my _guilty conscience_."  
  
"Um."  Akira's soft, raspy voice caught everyone's attention.  He ruffled the back of his hair with one red-gloved hand, looking up sheepishly away into the dark recesses of the ceiling.  "About that."  
  
No.  No no no no no no no--  
  
... except... 'I am thou'.  Akira... Akira hadn't said that.  He'd demanded Akechi vow to him, reach for his power, align with him through wanting to live in the face of failure at the eleventh hour, but... he hadn't ever claimed to be Akechi.  Every other Persona he'd seen-- Akechi's other five, every single Shadow that Joker had suborned into being his own -- they _all said that_ when they became Personae.  
  
Akira hadn't.  
  
"... You're... _not_ me."  
  
Oracle tackled the wind out of Akira before he could respond.  
  
That sparked a full-on rush at the-- at _Akira_ , crying and shoving trying to reach him in a group hug that looked more like a mob from where Akechi was standing.  Behind the glass wall of reality.  Air.  Where were his knees.  
  
Mementos flickered and left him sitting on the floor.  The turnstile was greasy against his cheek.  Akira was real.  
  
Akira was real.  
  
Akira.  Pulled him out of his grave.  Hired his body and didn't touch it.  Saw the corpses in the hotel room, rotting in the mud, in the river.  
  
Reality yanked Akechi back into itself once more with a thump of weight and fur.  There was a cat on his lap.  All claws and the edge of the sword laid across Akechi's torso like a sash, Mona perfectly balanced not to slice him open unless Akechi moved.    
  
"How did this even _happen_?" Mona yowled, getting everyone's attention.  
  
"The twins are mad at me," Akira explained, which made absolutely no sense.  He glanced over the group's heads towards an empty corner, giving it a tiny, rueful smile.  "Idiot inmates aren't allowed to waste all their hard work -- the twins', not mine -- by lazing around in a dank cell after screwing up."  He paused.  "Excuse me, a _cushy_ cell.  Only the finest in iron manacles and exotic molds on the mattress."  
  
... Wasn't that the same corner he'd kept randomly meditating in, back when he was alive?  
  
Mona growled and leapt off Akechi.  "Make _sense_!" he yelled at Akira.  
  
Akira considered that a moment.  "I didn't pass on, and got kicked out to help the first chance I got."  
  
"To _help_?" Skull echoed.  " _Him_?  He killed you!"  
  
"I don't really remember it much," Akira replied.  Then, "Besides, it's not his fault I died."  
  
Silence.  No protests.  No rebuttals.  In fact, the entire team shuffled or glanced guiltily away, like that was actually true.  
  
"What," Akechi managed hoarsely.  "I _killed you_.  I _pointed a gun at your face_ and _blew your brains out.  How is it not my fault?!_ "  
  
"You were supposed to."  
  
On Shido's orders, yes, how was that relevant--  
  
"But it was supposed to be a cognitive me."  
  
The world came to a shrieking halt.  
  
From somewhere very far away, Oracle said, "I bugged your phone.  So that when we knew you were getting close... when Sae got Joker's phone next to yours... I could send a signal to drop you into her Palace, and you'd shoot the cognitive Joker that developed during her interrogation of him and leave without anyone the wiser, but... but..." She sniffled.  " _But Sae never took Joker's phone!_ "  
  
"I forgot," Akira muttered.  
  
He _forgot_.  He forgot a plan _meant to save his life_ \--  
  
Of course he did.  Between the drugs, and the beatings, and how Joker's pupils had barely been tracking when Akechi... shot him...  
  
"You arrogant bastard."  The words slipped out, viciously hissed, and Akira blinked.  Akechi dragged himself up by the turnstile, inhaling deeply to hold the muscles that wanted to be shaking in broken laughter or sobs.  "Why didn't you just have someone else lie in wait?"  
  
"Wh--what?"  
  
"If Oracle.  Was Supposed.  To send the signal through _your_ phone to drop me in the Metaverse when Sae got it close enough to me, why didn't you cut out the middleman and just have someone else do it?"  These idiots.  These fucking, self-righteous, arrogant, naive _idiots_.  Did he have to spell it out in small words?    
  
Apparently he did.  "You could have always had _someone else_ enter the interrogation room next door in Sae's Palace, leave the Metaverse, and wait in that locked room that would be _deliberately left empty to prevent witnesses during the interrogation_.  Then, when Sae left, you could either activate my app from _their_ phone as I passed, or," the timing would've been so risky, but doable, "return to the Palace when she left the room, go into Joker's interrogation room, switch him with the cognitive, and escape with him via the Palace while I came in and shot the cognitive!"  Twenty seconds.  Twenty seconds it had taken him to come up with those.  "Two viable plans, none of which rely on a _tortured, exhausted, drugged, concussed prisoner to remember to do anything for it!_ "  
  
He wanted to hit them all.   "If I could, I would leave you right here with one of your idiotic sycophants," Akechi snarled.  "Skull's head certainly has enough space for one more."  
  
"Don't talk to Akira like that!" Panther snapped.  
  
"Shut up.  You used me."  They'd known what he was.  "Of all the people, I thought--" But they were just like everybody else, all they wanted was to use the devil among them.  "You used me, you knew what I was and you _used me to murder him_."   
  
_You thirteenth spirit, why do you try so hard?_  
  
His blood boiled.  He wanted to punch Akira right in his stricken face.  He wanted to rip the chains from his flesh and throw them, bloody and gory, at Akira's head.   
  
_Already your horn has been raised, your wrath has been kindled... your star has led you astray._  
  
 _What will you do?_  
  
Akechi closed his hands around the streaming chains, letting the sharp points drag blood from his palms.  "You wanted to see how my power works, Queen?"  Bitter laughter rang in his throat and in his head alike.  _Look, you have been told everything._  
  
"Goro," Akira reached for him. "Don't--!"  
  
" _Shrive_."  
  
Akira's eyes went blank, and he pulled his dagger free with puppetlike jerks.  The team scrambled out of his way, dodging the blade with panicked eyes, calling up their own Personae... and then screaming when Akira curled his arm around Akechi's shoulders and rammed the blade through his heart.  
  
 _I am thou.  Thou art I._  
  
Something pressed lips to Akechi's cheek.  He couldn't tell if it was in reality or not... or if it was just the blood streaming hot from his mouth, bubbling with every choked breath.  
  
"Judas," Goro coughed blood across Akira's temple, "Gnostica."  
  
Flowing, roughspun robes.  A trail of bloodstained silver coins, discarded by sandaled feet.  The man was tea-blonde and bearded, and looked enough like Goro's mother to be the uncle he'd never had.  He had no halo, dark or otherwise -- Goro knew enough about Christianity that a disciple should've had one -- but a star, silver edged in gold, hung low over the Persona's head, just out of reach.  He turned an anguished look on Goro, blinking thick tears from his dark eyes, before he vanished in a flare of fire.  
  
Ice, defense debuffs.  Horror stricken across every face as his eyes readjusted to the dimness after so much fire.  
  
Akechi sucked in a breath that tasted of blood -- he'd bitten his tongue this time, it really was blood -- and felt like reopening the nonexistent wound with a blade of ice.  He barely managed to stay on his feet against the pain.  He didn't manage to keep himself from clutching at his chest on the second breath.  
  
"Well?"  he spat.  "Did you _enjoy the show_?"  
  
Skull gulped, faintly green.  "Fucking hell, man..."  
  
"This... terrible suffering..." Fox shifted slightly towards Akechi, and that much was too much.  Akechi grabbed for and thumbed at his phone, only belatedly remembering that Oracle had blocked the app.  
  
Mementos shifted and wavered anyway, taking the team -- and Fox's terrible, beseeching hand -- with it.  
  
She'd lied.  
  
Of course she'd lied.  
  
Akechi fled for the trains.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
He couldn't manage to eat at dinner with Lala that night.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Goro slept most of election day away, too, waking only sporadically and dazedly whenever he shifted wrong.  His heart hurt.  
  
 _They used me._  
  
 _It's really Akira._  
  
 _He used me._  
  
It was really Akira.  Who'd.  The dagger.  And the blood.  And the carving Personae literally out of Goro's living body.  Traitors and villains and hated monsters, all.  
  
 _He used me._  
  
 _I murdered you and I_ hate _you and I would never do it again you utter-- utter-_ \--  
  
There were no words.  
  
 _And stay out of my dreams_ , Goro managed to think nastily as he faded out again.  
  
He woke to Lala shaking his shoulder hard.  "Wha...?"  The poorly-disguised panic on her face sent a jolt of adrenaline through his veins, and he startled halfway out from under the blanket.  
  
She picked up the remote.  "You're gonna want to see this, kid," she said, and turned on the tv.  
  
"-- _nce again, the shocking confession of Masayoshi Shido, given in place of a victory speech earlier tonight, as promised by the Phantom Thieves in a hacked broadcast just last night_..."  
  
Huh.  So he hadn't actually died, like Akechi had thought from the Shadow and Palace collapse.  Or, at least, he hadn't stayed dead.   
  
They cut to Shido, standing smugly before the poll boards and flanked by a couple of suits.  " _My election is the result of every citizen's aid_ ," he began, sounding not the least bit like the change of heart had taken at all.  " _Your support warms my heart!  That is why... that is exactly why._.."   Shido's expression cracked.  " _I cannot forgive myself!_ "   
  
This.  This grief.  This was exactly the pain Goro had always wanted to see in that man.  
  
Why didn't it feel like the triumph it was?  
  
" _The reason President Okumura passed away is... I am the one who killed him_."  Goro barely noticed the gray suit trying to signal off-camera to end the broadcast.  " _I framed the Phantom Thieves for it!  As well as for all the other incidents, the deaths and the hospitalizations and the psychotic episodes that have injured and killed countless victims... I am responsible!  Exactly as the Phantom Thieves said in their calling card!  I am a true criminal that can be tried for any crime, and it still wouldn't be enough!  Even... even the assassination of their leader is true... I ordered it!  I ordered a child, my own son, to kill him!_ "  
  
His son.  He'd acknowledged Goro at long last... and Goro felt nothing.  
  
" _My son... my little boy... what have I done._.." Shido visibly swayed, white-knuckled on the microphone.  " _I killed you too... I killed all the Phantom Thieves!  They were all just children_..."  
  
Lala hit mute.  
  
Goro stared at Shido, his mouth continuing to move in silence, for a long second before he dragged his eyes up to meet Lala's.  
  
"Is that true?" Lala asked.  "You're clearly alive... but the rest of them.  Akira's friends.  Are they...?"  
  
"Alive," Goro managed to say.  
  
Relief broke over her face, twisting it almost back into grief.  "Thank goodness," she murmured.  She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.  "Thank goodness.  Oh."  She fluttered her hand at her eyes, looking up.  "Oh I'm going to ruin my makeup.  I don't have time for this, I have to go back to the bar."  
  
Hold on.  "... Why would you think Akira's friends would have anything to do with me?"  
  
She blinked.  "I don't.  But they survived a month with a guy like that gunning for them, and three weeks of that you were still working for the guy with all their names in your head.  You're keeping tabs on them, aren't you?"  
  
Not unless and until you counted the battle to steal Shido's Treasure.  
  
"Well."  She folded up her handkerchief neatly and hid it in her collar once more.  "As long as the kids are all right, I'm good.  Yes."  Then, leaning down to pat his shoulder, she tugged the blankets more closely around him.  "I'll be down in the bar if you need me, just remember to change into your disguise if you do."  
  
"... I will, Lala-chan."  
  
She smiled, turned off the tv, and left.  
  
Goro sat, still and empty, for a long moment.  That was... that was...  
  
... This whole night was something to just lie down and go to sleep about.  Except that Goro's phone went off before he'd done much more than punch his pillow back into shape.  
  
People didn't text him.  They just... didn't.  And he didn't want to talk anyway.  
  
It chimed again.  And again.  And then again, until there was only a second's pause between chimes.  
  
Oh for-- forget unique Persona powers, clearly all anybody had to do to cause a psychotic break was start pinging someone's phone like this for long enough.  
  
Akechi grabbed it and opened the chat.  
  
 _Futaba: omg all this time he's been ur DAD?_ (ｏ・_・)ノ”(ノ_ <、)  
  
Delete.  
  
 _Futaba: nope u can't block dis_  
  
 _Futaba: but srsly ur dad_  
  
 _Futaba: and ur hiding from him or he'd know u were alive_  
  
 _Futaba: no wonder ur such a headcase_  
  
 _Goro: Please go away._  
  
 _Futaba: Aha!  It speaks!_  
  
Delete.  
  
 _Futaba: rude!  also, dumb.  told you that wouldn't work._  
  
Delete.  
  
 _Futaba: srsly?_  
  
 _Goro: I am attempting to make a point.  Clearly it isn't working._  
  
 _Futaba: no one escapes the alibaba!_  
  
 _Goro: Allow me to communicate in your language.  This is you right now:_ (*´∇`)┌θ☆  (눈_눈)   _This is what I'm trying to be:_ (__o__) zzZZzzZZ  _So this is what you should be:_ C= C= C= C= C=┌(;・ω・)┘  _Therefore, could you please cease this farce of having any wish to speak to me and GO AWAY?_  
  
 _Futaba: ... ur google-fu is pretty good for an amateur.  ok, i'm impressed enough to let you go._  
  
 _Futaba: FOR NOW.  mwehehe._  
  
The chat closed itself, leaving behind no sign of it ever having existed in the first place.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
The next evening, she was back.  
  
 _Futaba: ok, I am leveled up and ready for boss battle!_  
  
Goro stared at his phone, which had opened up a text box mid-crossword.  
  
 _Futaba: Mom.  Palace.  Exposition._  
  
Oh dear gods no.  
  
 _Futaba: chop chop.  I'm only raising EXP the longer I sit here sniping firewalls and gathering key items._  
  
Delete.  
  
 _Futaba: **NOW**._  
  
 _Goro: You realize I don't much care what you'll do to me if I don't obey._  
  
 _Futaba: Which is why I'm not bothering to tell you what the threat is._  
  
 _Futaba: You owe me._  
  
 _Goro: You used me._  
  
 _Futaba: AND I LOST A BROTHER OUT OF THAT.  Half my family, Crow!  YOU OWE ME._  
  
Goro bit his lip, his heart growing heavier with each reread of the text.  Then he began, slowly, to type.  
  
 _Goro: Your mother... didn't have a Palace.  I hadn't been operating very..._  
  
He deleted that.  
  
 _Goro: Your mother didn't have a Palace.  I'd been operating for about eight months at that point, and working for Shido for three, but it was nothing like the rate at which your team worked.  Fortunately, all my targets to that point had only been in Mementos, and on the top two floors at that.  It was difficult to reach them, at my skill level and working alone, but there were far fewer wandering Shadows at that time.  There always have been, when I've gone in and your team hasn't been present.  I think the place may react in direct proportion to number present._  
  
 _Goro: All the individuals I'd found in personal pockets of Mementos, like those your team targets for missions through the Phan-site, were either... boastful and vile, like your team missions, or... catatonic.  Living dolls._  
  
It hadn't been the majority, but a distinct number of his targets had been barely responsive, uninterested in their surroundings or his sudden appearance.  They'd been easy to interrogate, at least, so Goro could solve their cases if and when he was later asked to.  
  
 _Goro: I could distract the boastful ones to look away, and the dolls just needed a nudge.  So they didn't see me or the exit when I cast a frenzying spell on them and escaped._  
  
 _Goro: Your mother, though... she was awake._  
  
No response.  
  
 _Goro: She was awake, and aware, and fascinated by her surroundings.  She'd written math all over the walls and floors, I'm not sure what with, and when I went in she began firing questions at me for several minutes._  
  
 _Goro: Then..._  
  
Then.  
  
Then she'd.  
  
He didn't want to tell Futaba this.  She didn't have a right to know.  This was _his_...  
  
 _Goro: Then she recognized me.  And asked how my mother was doing._  
  
 _Goro: She had no idea my mother had been dead for nearly ten years.  She hadn't cared to find out--_  
  
Delete.  
  
 _Goro: She had no idea my mother had been dead for nearly ten years._  
  
 _Goro: I hit her with the spell without making sure she wasn't facing me or the exit._  
  
 _Goro: I barely got out alive._  
  
 _Goro: She... didn't._  
  
The chat stayed silent for several minutes.  
  
 _Futaba is typing._  
  
 _Futaba is typing._  
  
 _Futaba is typing._  
  
 _Futaba: ... okay, that checks out with timing and stuff._  
  
 _Futaba: I'm not forgiving you._  
  
 _Futaba: But I think I can live with an... accident, sort of, self-defense thing... better than I can with the other things I was worried it could've been._  
  
 _Futaba: ... She was really a special Shadow?_  
  
Delete.  
  
This time, Futaba let it stick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Persona dialogue taken from the Gospel of Judas.


	7. Chapter 7

The next morning, while Goro was getting ready for work, another chat alert started going off.  It continued unbroken for ten minutes, until Goro buried his phone as deep in the linen closet as possible.  
  
When he got back, it was still ringing.  He jammed another pile of towels on top and shut the door.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Sleep.  Breakfast.  Mindless work.  Laundry.  Sleep.  Bath.  Lunch.  Stare blankly at the dim shapes of Lala's happy youth, immortalized on the walls.  Sleep.  Steal Lala's asprin for the headache that flared up when being horizontal so long made his blood pressure too high in his head.  
  
Go into the linen closet and turn the volume on his phone down.  
  
Hear it turn itself right back up minutes or hours later, until the buzz was audible -- barely -- throughout the kitchen and living room.  
  
Sleep.  
  
Lala had left for work just twenty minutes before, and Goro was just starting to doze off in a haze of warm blankets and floral dishwashing scent left on his hands, when the lock clunked and the door opened.  
  
"Nnh?"  
  
Several people spilled into the genkan, young and chattering voices and _what on earth was Akira's team doing here?!_  
  
Goro, pushed half-upright and with cool air prickling into his gaping pink-flowered yukata, stared in open horror as Lala sailed through the crowd.  
  
"What're you doing back in bed, kid?" she asked, unimpressed.  "Get up.  You have guests."  She waited just long enough for Goro to pull his yukata closed and into some semblence of order, and make motions of getting up, before she turned a stern look on the team.  "No more sneaking cats into my bar, and don't hurt the kid."  
  
"Of course, Lala-chan," Makoto replied, bowing contritely.  "We apologize for the cat."  
  
"Next time just tell me it's a service animal, dear," Lala informed her.  Then, to Goro, "And get your phone out of the linen closet.  This one's," she gestured at Futaba, "promised to stop her auto-dialing."  
  
"I _said_ I was _sorry_.  I didn't know he was living with someone!"  
  
Futaba quailed and shut up under Lala's raised eyebrow.  Then Lala returned to Goro.  "Can I trust them with you?"  
  
She had a business to run, after all, Goro knew.  If the door had been unlocked for the team to get in, happy hour was starting, too.  "... I'll be fine.  They don't kill."  
  
 _Unlike me_.  
  
Lala did not look happy with that, but she inclined her head, honoring his decision, and left... Leaving Goro alone with seven people who would quite probably happily beat him to within an inch of his life and leave him for dead.  He braced himself for the hit.  
  
It was Haru who stepped forward.  The physically strongest member of the team who didn't know any martial arts or get in fistfights regularly.  So they'd chosen maximum pain for minimum damage, Akechi thought, as she visibly steeled herself.  
  
"We need you to join the team," she said. "One last time."  At Akechi's stunned silence, she continued, "We're going into the Depths of Mementos, and we don't plan to stop until we reach the very bottom.  We need every Persona user we can get."  A shaky breath.  "No matter what we think of them."  
  
... She had the most reason to hate this offer.  That must be why she was making it.  And, looking around at the rest of the team... she _was_ the one with the greatest objection.  Even Ryuji wasn't holding himself as stiffly as Haru was.  
  
But.  
  
"... Forgive me the question, but... _why_ are you going back?"  Shido was ruined.  The entire mess was over.  
  
Incredulous stares.  
  
"Man, ain't you been watching the news?" Ryuji blurted.  
  
"Something is seriously wrong."  Ann dug out her phone and tapped it a few times, the others doing the same.  "Here, look!"  
  
 _It's Not Broke, The Thieves Fixed It_  
  
The article underneath was, apparently, a completely serious opinion piece.  It said that, since Shido was the duly-elected Prime Minister and the Phantom Thieves had fixed his morals... he should just be instated, and the trial and sentencing left til the end of his term.  
  
Akechi's eyes flicked up to the address bar, but the site wasn't satirical.  Neither was the column.  
  
Five more phones hung in his line of sight.  
  
The Phan-site forums were a morass of indifferently-spelled takes on the same theme: everyone was sick of the whole farce, let the politicians sort it all out, and a strange sort of mutual flagellation about anybody bothering to come to the site at all anymore.  
  
ZNN's top story was the new Speaker of the Councillors' -- whoever that was -- diatribe about fake news.  
  
NGK had several headlines fighting for supremacy, all about Shido's psychiatric collapse and... heroic efforts in the face of political sabotage and manipulation, the stress of which had caused said collapse.  _Heroic?_  
  
Another forum had only a bolded, all-caps post left at the top of a subject labeled "Masayoshi Shido": THIS THREAD CLOSED FOR LACK OF ACTIVITY.  
  
NTV News wasn't running any Shido or Phantom Thieves articles at all, and didn't have any in the three days' headlines archived at the bottom.  
  
Akechi reached out, taking Haru's phone with shaking hands.  "What."  He swallowed.  "What is going on...?"  Shido's ruin.  His fall.  Everything Akechi had worked for, everyone he'd... and this was the reaction?  _This?_    "People don't act like this."  
  
He _knew_ audiences.  Crowds.  Any _one_ of Shido's crimes should have people _rioting in the streets_.  Just the calling card alone, the mere _accusation_ , had brought people shouting at the gates of the Diet.  
  
"It has to be Mementos," Morgana said.  "There's nothing else that could be affecting people so widely, so fast."  
  
Nothing else.  
  
Just Mementos.  
  
Something about Mementos... something inside Mementos... was taking Shido's ruin, the crimes and horrors and... leaving only apathy.  About Akira's death.  
  
The phone clicked very precisely when Akechi set it down on the table.  "Let me get dressed."  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
"How did you find me, anyway?" Akechi asked Oracle, as Mona drove them towards the very deepest door.  
  
She continued to stare out the darkened window, rather than look at him.  "I GPS'd your phone, duh."  
  
"... That shouldn't work.  Shido's Medjed tried several times."  
  
"Well Shido's asshole fake didn't have the app."  
  
"... Point taken."  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
"This is it?" Akechi asked, when Mona let them off at the final door.  It looked just like the other two he'd seen, both the one that had sealed the rest of Mementos from him for two years and the one that he'd seen open for the thieves just after he joined them.  "It seems... normal."  
  
Behind him, Skull grumbled something unintelligible.  
  
"There's no need for Mementos to conform to any human sense of drama," Queen said sharply.  "If we're ready, though... I have one final request."  Akechi bit back the audience-charming joke about kisses (because _no_ , even if the team wouldn't attack him for it, _no_ ) and raised an eyebrow at her, waiting.  "Summon Akira to lead us."  
  
No.  
  
Akira shouldn't need to see... whatever horrors might lie in wait here.  
  
"He has the right to see this through."  
  
... He did.  He also had the right to still be alive, and to never have to deal with this... this... _place_.  
  
Akechi sighed.  "Is this a unanimous request, then?"  He hoped it was just a whim.  Queen didn't really have whims, though.  
  
"If he ain't gonna stab you again, yeah," Skull said.  "Because that was screwed the fuck up.  Bring him out."  
  
"That's a specific spell," Akechi muttered, but when no one else objected, he reached for his mask.  
  
Akira emerged with one eyebrow already raised in curiosity.  He looked around, then at the team.  "What are we doing?"  Queen stepped forward and explained.  Akira considered that for a moment, then shrugged, and let himself settle to the floor with a tap of sturdy boots.  And just like that, Joker -- unmasked, but still Joker -- took command of the party once more.  "Let's go," he said, and led them down into the darkness.  
  
At the bottom of the broken escalator, the new block opened up into a cavernous platform, shimmering faintly violet in the light from four stories of trains disgorging passengers to either side.  The far wall was carved with the same pattern as the doors, writ easily ten times as large, and seemed to be made of obsidian flaked in such a way that it looked almost like something organic under the carving.  
  
The sharp curve of black ribs jutted up in an open-topped arch over the platform leading to it, vaguely like unfinished streetlamps.  
  
"What was that you were saying about not conforming to a human sense of drama?"  Akechi murmured.  
  
"Don't.  Just... don't."  Queen eyed the far wall, then the platforms towering to either side.  "People are walking in and out of there, so the other side of the wall must be..."  She paused.  "Wait, it's a giant door!"  
  
It was, clearly, by the carving... but Akechi had to correct one point.  "Queen... No one's walking out of there at all."  Which explained why Mementos was empty.  If this had been going on for two and a half years... the silhouettes and Shadows he'd seen in the Metaverse above, on that horrific journey to Shinjuku, must've been the last stragglers in emptying all of Japan.  There was nothing left to replenish the higher blocks of Mementos now.  
  
... They would all be in there.  
  
Akechi's fists clenched, but he gamely trailed in the team's wake as Akira marched ahead, always the guiding star and lodestone.  The veins pulsing underfoot petered out within a few meters, fortunately, and then another few later they could see there was no smaller door or lever in the giant one at all.  
  
"... How are we going to get in?" Panther asked, then squeaked when the wall itself cracked open at the question, pillars lifting like a curtain... or like a gaping maw under the door carving's semblence of malevolent, glowing red eyes.  
  
Oracle slowed, adjusting her mask.  "Hold on," she said.  "Guys?  The door only opens from this side."  Akechi did not like the sound of that.  "If we go in... I don't think we're getting out until we erase Mementos, once and for all."  
  
"Well..." Noir said, "that _is_ the plan..."  
  
No objections.  They trooped in, finding the maw (which didn't close behind them) led to a long corridor flanked on either side by a forest of iron bars, arranged in precisely regimented squares like troops.  Something glowed a vibrant red up ahead, something that glittered with pulses of energy sliding down.  Something like a massive bundle of fiberoptics, or an artist's conception of a tree if all they had was fiberoptics to work with, the trunk disappearing into a bottomless pit whose sides were a grid of cavitations as far as the eye could see in every direction.  
  
Some of the cavitations were lit up.  Bright red, barred, and occupied.  
  
Prison cells.  
  
"What..." Panther began.  "What sort of scenery _is_ this?  What does everyone think this world _is_?"  
  
"Surely it's not so odd," Akechi replied.  "As many people took heart from the Phantom Thieves' rebellious ways, before we arranged for your star to fall?  Haven't you all been saying you wished to inspire people?"  Or, they used to.  Not often, and less so with every week Akechi was with them, but... "What would rebels need to inspire them _to_ , if they didn't already think the world had them trapped?"  
  
Not like Akechi had been.  Not like Kaneshiro's girls, once the man had dragged them into a life of prostitution.  Not even like the Cleaner's yakuza, so many of whom had been teens just looking for a place to belong.  So few adults were actually trapped the way kids could be... but they thought they were, and so.  Here they were.  
  
... Not all of them, though.  Off to the right, movement made a milling crowd visible in the darkness, clustered loosely before another door.  This door, though, remained closed even as they approached, and the crowd took no notice as they slid into the gaps between people.  
  
"Please..." someone near Akechi murmured.  "Please open up... all my dreams..."  
  
"My deepest desire will be fulfilled..."  
  
"... happiness..."  
  
"... let me in..."  
  
Everybody was saying something like that, soft murmurs and mutters only addressed to themselves.  Could they not see the prison cells...?  
  
Shadows weren't like humans.  Whatever existed in their surroundings was only rarely relevant to them.  
  
"Up here," Akira said.  He'd floated, or perhaps hopped, to a block off to the side of the door, and beckoned them over.  That platform led to a higher one, and a large opening there let them inside.  
  
Akechi paused, eyeing the... window?  Gate?  There were bars on either side, but no sign they'd ever been in place at the center.  
  
"Abandon hope, all ye," he muttered, and went through.  
  
The room behind was... wrong.  The way the floor was broken up into pillars of basalt was too regular, too intricate, perfect interlocking circles and precise geometrics everywhere... until you looked up and saw the bones.  The ceiling was vaulted with ribs and spines, braced with flying buttresses that could've been fresh living tendon or long straight bones in the dim light, which itself came more from a vague ruddy glow from far below -- the only thing marking the edges of the platforms so that you wouldn't walk right off them -- than from the white pyramids in the floor.  
  
Nothing moved in the darkness except themselves, and the shadows they cast whenever they passed by a lamp.  
  
Nothing at all.  
  
The missing Shadow-people, all the millions of Japan, Akechi figured _that_ was easy enough to explain, but what had happened to all the _other_ Shadows?  
  
They passed between two of the pillars risen high to create walls, and found a panopticon.  A round space surrounded by large cages... and here were the people.  
  
"Guys..." Oracle said.  
  
"Oh, hey," one of the nearest captives said.  He stood calmly, hands in his pockets, about half a meter back from the bars.  "What're you guys doing out there?  You should come inside, it's nice in here."  
  
A woman nearby glanced over.  "Don't open the doors, okay?  We're good people here and have no intention of leaving."  
  
Akechi felt his brow furrow as Fox protested, as the first two and another, older man pulled him and Oracle and Queen into a discussion.  Well, as much as 'but what the fuck' vs. 'it's so much nicer to give up' counted as conversation, anyway.  There wasn't much listening or considering the others' side going on, so it was more talking at each other.  
  
"-- like the locked Quarantine Cell--"  
  
"The what?" Akechi asked sharply.  
  
The old man blinked.  "Quarantine... There's a terrible criminal there, but," he chuckled faintly, "of course, who would want to go looking into a place like that?"  
  
A door that only opened from the outside, after the eight areas of Mementos that themselves had been locked... a second door that was also firmly locked... a quarantine cell...  
  
Akechi _really_ didn't like the sound of this.  
  
And then the other Shadows, the ones he'd been wondering about the whereabouts of, attacked.  He didn't have time to think any more on the matter, in the whirl of switching Personae and casting spells and -- with a dazed cat murmuring about having seen the mass cage before -- escaping deeper into the facility.  
  
The feeling only grew when, after a couple more fights, they ran into a dead end.  A pillar in the corner looked odd, but the team circled the other way to hide in the shadows against the other wall, and they found a much smaller cage suspended over the bottomless, dimly fiery pit first.  
  
"What's this thing?" Panther murmured.  "Look, there's more of those weird energy veins coming out of it.  And someone inside!"  
  
Akechi sighed.  "It's pointless to bother."  
  
"But we could get vital information!"  
  
"We won't.  It's just a living doll type of Shadow.  They all say pretty much the same thing."  Aaaaand she wasn't listening.  "They always have," Akechi finished to himself.  
  
It was probably stupid, but as they tried to interrogate the doll, he wandered over to the odd pillar in the other corner, Akira trailing along behind him.  It had an inset panel of concentric squares, glowing red, and tapping it turned it -- and all the interlocking circles on the floor -- a vibrant golden yellow.  
  
Several yelps came from the corner where he'd left the team.  "It's all right," Akechi called back.  "It's just a puzzle lock."  Those weren't unusual in Palaces.  People tended to have convoluted ways of thinking on at least one topic, after all: they weren't very good at being straightforward or logical at all.  Here, though...  
  
The fact of the puzzle lock joined that of the crowd's door, of the one-way giant door, the rumored quarantine cell... Mona's claim to have seen this place before, though it hadn't been open until now...  
  
Mind working furiously and suspicions rising, Akechi waited for the team to rejoin him and pressed on.  
  
More fights, more single cages with living dolls that Akechi ignored, a second puzzle lock.  A third.  Then the next cavernous void that opened up was far darker than before, with a giant spine rising up from the blazing red pit dead ahead, and a long, Shadowless straightaway sloping down into darkness.  Mona transformed into the bus once more, rumbling with impatience, and they sped down until pillars made the confines too tight to drive around again.  
  
There was a second mass cage here.  Panther yelped after just two steps in, jerking towards Skull in open alarm.  "You!"  
  
The man in the white T-shirt standing near the bars of the cage looked familiar... ah.  Kamoshida.  The predatory coach, right.  Akechi had almost forgotten.  And Madarame... Kaneshiro...  
  
"Is President Okumura here too?" Oracle asked, but Akechi barely heard.  He only had eyes for the man who had, unlike every other Shadow in the mass prison, separated from the crowd and bothered to find a seat.  
  
He just _had_ to be privileged, even as an apathetic doll imprisoned in the bowels of Mementos.  Didn't he.  
  
"Unfortunately," Shido said, "Okumura isn't here with us."  He slowly stood and walked towards the bars.  "Nothing can be done for the dead.  I'm sorry."  
  
Haru snapped something at him, but Akechi wasn't listening.  They'd.  They'd put Shido here.  In this place.  He was in prison and in Hell, exactly as Akechi had always wanted.  
  
Exactly. As. He'd. Wanted.  
  
Exactly.  
  
Why did Akechi feel sick?  
  
Shido turned that odd... was it remorseful?  Could it be?... look on Akechi.  "Oh, my children," he murmured, terrible and soft.  "My beautiful children... I didn't kill you after all."  
  
"Not for lack of trying!" Skull yelled, loudly enough to register with Akechi, and Shido's gaze snapped to him.  
  
"I'm not talking to _you_ ," he told the blond, sounding almost alive for a moment.  "I'm talking to my son--"  
  
Wait, he'd said _children_.  
  
"--and daughter."  Oracle went dead white.  "Wakaba never told you?"  Shido almost smiled, as Oracle started shaking her head in stricken denial.  "I'm not surprised.  She wanted a child, not a partner in parenting."  
  
It couldn't be.  It couldn't.  
  
 _Oh my goodness.  You're... Goro-kun, wasn't it?  You look too much like your mother to be anyone else.  Tell me, how is she?_  
  
But Wakaba had known his mother, and his name.  
  
"You're lying," Oracle choked out.  
  
Shido had no reason to lie.  Not here.  Not now.  Not about this.  
  
The man shrugged, leaning companionably against the bars.  "She might have the contract still among her papers, cutting all my custodial and parental rights.  That's what she promised in exchange for the donation, that I would never have to acknowledge you... and that she would, in turn, keep Goro secret as well."  
  
Blackmail.  Akechi's existence had been used as blackmail to... to... he had a _sister_.  
  
He had a sister.  
  
"Wakaba never was very good at reading people," Shido mused.  "If her job hadn't protected her, I would've had her killed for that much earlier."  
  
He'd killed his sister's mother.  
  
Shido gave a vague little huff of a laugh.  "I was such a fool."  He rested his cheek on one hand.  "I could've spent the last years of the world with my children."  
  
Akira's fist plowed into his face.  
  
Goro stood there, numbly watching Shido backing off submissively... passively.  Watching Akira's mouth move.  Something buzzed in his ears, so much wah-wah-wah Charlie Brown in the team's voices, in Madarame's.  
  
His sister.  
  
His father.  Regretted.  Not being a parent.  
  
Why _now?_ Why, when it was too late?  Why could he only regret abandoning Goro like _this_ , as a detached Shadow waiting for oblivion?  
  
And Futaba...  
  
A hand came to rest on Goro's forearm.  Red gloved.  Chains and blue fire.  Akira.  Who had Oracle pulled close, her mask pushed to the top of her head and her face buried against his shoulder.  
  
No.  No, why was Akira dragging Futaba this close to him?  
  
Akechi jerked away.  
  
"We need to go," Queen said urgently, some time after that.  
  
More Shadow guards.  The world reduced itself to spellfire and gunshots, his heart in his throat as he methodically switched between Personae (Not Loki.  Never Loki.) only to bring Akira back out after each fight for Oracle.  
  
That the Per-- Akira rested a guiding hand on his shoulder the entire time was irrelevant.  
  
Climbing.  Jumping down.  Backtracking.  Single cages.  More guards.  
  
A long drop.  
  
A safe room.  
  
Goro stumbled, tripped over a stool, and caught himself on the stone table.  His throat burned.  His eyes burned.  He had a sister.  He'd killed her mother.  Shido... Shido...  
  
 _I just wanted to be loved_ , a girl whispered.  
  
That familiar hand on his shoulder.  
  
Goro reached blindly for it, caught awkwardly at the fingertips, managed to grip fiercely at just two of Akira's fingers.  He sucked in one shuddering breath.  
  
 _Being alone is the most terrible thing._..  
  
"Please, Akira..."  
  
... _but we don't have to be._  
  
" _Please_."  
  
 _I am thou_.  
  
" _Shrive_."  
  
He choked on a sob as the knife slid in, but the pain was distant, a long-forgotten memory of the burn of a scraped knee and bravely choking back the tears from cleaning it.  It hurt worse when Akira's hand vanished from his grip.  
  
 _Thou art I,_ the girl bleeding from his heart murmured soothingly.  Warmth bloomed into existence in narrow bands around his shoulders, pressed against his side, and one spot against his uncovered cheek.  
  
"Eleos."  
  
She materialized fully with her arms around him, one hand pressing the blue cloth of her shawl against the tears streaming down his face.  "Shh.  Let it out."  
  
Goro buried his face into her shoulder and shook.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Ygor hax means that the app is supplying backup battery power, bc his game won't work if either side can't get OUT of the Metaverse, and there are no power outlets there  
> \- Snoopy is very popular in Japan, and so it follows that Charlie Brown is known  
> \- and here is where I do something completely stupid and merge back into canon. I am never doing this again omfg.  
> \- Eleos: Athenian (Greek) goddess of sorrow, succor, and (emotional) sanctuary.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- if you're curious/worried, I headcanon Wakaba was less 'bed' and more 'turkey baster'. I couldn't get a full list of the regulations on Japanese IVF clinics, but with such a stigma on single moms and a flat ban on gay couples, I seriously doubt they'd take a single woman as a client. And Wakaba can have perfectly reasonable aversions to one-night-stands. (STDs, sexual violence, asexuality, genetic quality -- I figure she picked Shido as "healthy, intelligent, successful: no wish to claim the child".)

  
Goro didn't know how long he shuddered blindly in his new Persona's arms.  But when he finally blinked against her dampened shoulder, he found he'd been pulled to sit on the edge of the table, leaning heavily against her.  
  
And the entire team was there, he belatedly remembered, as the thrumming power that'd sparked the Shrive began to ebb.  Not that he could see them, but they were... they couldn't have missed having to observe that whole, shameful display.  
  
"Eleos," he repeated hoarsely, keeping the Persona solid and present.  He didn't want to resummon Akira, not to see this... not when Akira would go to Futaba, or hover between Goro and the team trying visibly not to take sides (and failing to hide that he wanted to take the team's).  
  
Eleos, at least, was on his.  
  
Slowly, though, Goro pulled away, her slender arms loosening to let him slide free.  
  
Eleos was a girl just Goro's age, tear-streaked and clad in a flowing white toga.  A deep blue shawl lay in thick folds over one shoulder, fallen from the other -- which Goro had soaked through nearly transparent -- to catch on the crook of her elbow.  But she was Japanese, not Greek, and had her hair up in a completely anachronistic ponytail with half a dozen thoroughly modern bobby pins in it.  
  
She quirked a gentle smile at him, and blotted the last bit of wetness from his face with the corner of her shawl.  Then she let her hands slip from his shoulders, landing on his forearm with a comforting, encouraging squeeze, and tipped her head to the side.  
  
Goro followed that gesture to see the team.  
  
Skull, who he vaguely remembered hearing grousing while the Shrive went off, was standing awkwardly off to one side, facing pointedly away from the room with the tips of his ears blush-red.  Fox stood next to him, not quite shoulder to shoulder, but was watching the rest of them blatantly.  Goro had to look away from that stark gaze when the boy's eyes landed on him.  
  
Noir... was tapping the handle of her axe with her eyes pinned to the door.  
  
And Oracle.  
  
Oracle.  He.  Could barely see, sandwiched between Panther and Queen on the far side of the room, where a slab of rock took the place of the couches and beds other safe rooms had.  She had Mona on her lap, curled in a way that would've looked natural had he been in his real-world cat form instead of this one.  He looked a bit like someone had put a beach ball in Oracle's lap for lack of a teddy bear.  
  
He couldn't see her face.  It was buried atop the cat's head, her mask pushed up to stare straight ahead with blind, accusing eyes.  But he could see the faint trembling running through her frame, visible mostly in how it made the lenses of the mask glitter in the low light.  
  
The cat yelped when she suddenly shot to her feet, sending him tumbling to the floor.  She brushed off Panther's and Queen's hands and, face set and fists clenching, she stalked over to stand in front of Goro.  
  
Hopefully Eleos would block the hit.  Or would she?  She wasn't human, after all... did she even have defenses against Strike?  
  
Oracle's chin jutted out stubbornly.  "I don't have to like you," she began, "and when I yelled at you about killing my coffeebro, that was _not_ telling the universe to give me a replacement, but The Sperm Donor's idea of winning is having no family and screwing with people's heads."  Her expression darkened even further.  " _Screw that_ ," she snarled.  "You _are_ my brother, and if nothing else we can get down to the bottom of this dungeon and kick the ass of whatever final boss has been screwing with us all."  She jabbed a hand at him like she wanted to stab something else entirely.  " _Together_."  
  
Goro stared.  He barely noticed Eleos' beaming departure, or the soft imprint of her powers -- Despair, Psi, One-Shot Kill -- into his mind.  
  
Together.  
  
Slowly, cautiously, he took his sister's hand.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
  
The next fight netted them access to a strange glowing orb, which turned out to be part of yet another puzzle lock.  Past there were more guards, and more listless captives.  
  
"Hey," a middle-aged man said, more because they'd paused outside his cell to get a look at the lay of the land than because they'd tried to talk to him.  (After so many fruitless conversations, the rest of the team seemed to be coming around to Akechi's understanding of this kind of Shadow.)  "You guys better be careful.  We're not the only ones here."  Akechi glanced sharply at the man, who continued, "I've heard there's a place reserved for the most terribly evil people of them all."  
  
"Do you think that could be the Quarantine Cell we heard about?" Oracle asked him.  
  
"I would hope so," Akechi replied.  He really, really was starting to worry that it wasn't.  
  
They reached another of the darker areas, the ones that held driveable straightaways, in short order.  The spine that had taken up so much attention in the previous one wasn't apparent here: plunging into the pit was a thick cluster of the fiberoptic arteries that infested the place, gathered more closely together than they had been at the top of the prison.  
  
"We're so far underground..." Queen murmured.  
  
Fox peered over the edge of the pit.  "I hope we don't suddenly find ourselves in a giant pool of lava," he said.  
  
At this rate, it was really looking like they would.  "We'll be sure to notice the heat before then," Akechi said.  
  
Which.  Was something else to worry about.  There seemed to be no sense of temperature here, unlike in other Palaces.  A cave system should be cold, the annual average temperature of its local climate outside the entrance-- so, for Tokyo, about 15' C, a brisk spring day notably lower than room temperature -- but with so many millions of people, and the near-constant glow that seemed to be lava, and the exertion of so many Shadow fights, it should actually be stifling here.  
  
Shouldn't it?  
  
He inhaled quickly, and felt no corresponding sensation of faint chill in his nose.  
  
Very worrying.  
  
They piled into the catbus and plunged onwards.  
  
When Mementos became undriveable again, they'd reached what looked like another mass cell... but no.  These were individual cages, stacked in blocks two high like lab rats.  And off to the side, centered in pride of place, was a heavy barred archway.  Inside, under a red alert light and two steps up, a steel door sat just out of reach behind the bars, with no viewport, food slot, or air vent.  It went without saying that there was no handle or label, but there was only one cell this could possibly be.  
  
"Quarantine," Noir murmured.  
  
"Supposedly," Fox said, "the most sinful, most dangerous inmate is held here..."  
  
Mona's gaze was fixed to the door.  "This... This place smells familiar for some reason."  
  
 _Is this, then...?_ Akechi thought.  
  
"There's no mistake.  This is it."  Mona's narrow shoulders slumped.  "I was born here."  
  
Akechi failed to be surprised.  Mona was weak to electric... which he didn't have.  But Huntsman did have confuse and attack buffs, which the party might need if Mona...  
  
"Wait..." Panther gasped.  "Are _you_ the dangerous inmate?!"  
  
 _Possibly_.  
  
"No."  Now that, Akechi was surprised at, enough so that his mental fingertips slipped off of Huntsman.  "The inmate wasn't me," Mona continued, "But I remember this place.  Someone created me here... to guide all of you."  
  
Ah.  Lure and bait, not culprit who required so many locks.  But then, what had made him?  What did the prison do to recalcitrant inmates, to escapees who couldn't develop their own Palace to encase them?  What _could_ it do, but try to retrieve and break them?  
  
What was Mona's purpose?  
  
But more guards found them before Mona could remember more, and they had to keep going.  
  
And then they found another puzzle lock.  
  
This... changed Akechi's suspicions drastically, even as he worked through the puzzle on automatic.  If Mona had been created by the 'most dangerous prisoner', somehow through the seemingly-impenetrable quarantine door, then why were there more locks past that door?  Was Mona not leading them into a trap after all?  
  
Another orb slot required a second puzzle just to reach its orb.  That orb opened up a floor piece to let them solve a third puzzle.  Then came a series of three more puzzles, each nested into the last.  
  
What sort of terrible... thing, it couldn't be a person, not when Shido himself was in mere gen pop barely halfway down... what sort of terrible thing required _six more locks_ past the 'most dangerous prisoner'?  (And why was there a path to it at all?)  
  
They found another safe room, and stayed in it just long enough to patch up and eat a little curry.  Akechi shared his vending machine drinks in return, the ones he'd hunted down all over Tokyo before fleeing to Lala's.  
  
Down again.  Just a few steps past the safe room, the basalt pillars opened up to a cavern... the same one they'd seen as the pit at the top of the prison, and at the driveable paths with the great spine and the arteries, because the spine came to a tail end here, encircling a monolith of cage blocks like some red-lit modern Colosseum, with the arteries just visible plunging into its core.  
  
The only way to reach it was on the flayed, blackened bones of the very tailtip of the spine.  
  
"Is... is everyone's Treasure in there?" Noir asked.  
  
Mona nodded curtly.  "Yeah."  
  
"This bizarrely ominous air..." Fox murmured.  "It could be likened to a temple of sorts."  
  
It... really could.  "The temple of all humanity," Akechi mused, pulling off a glove and crouching to test the slipperiness of the spine's glistening tendons.  Falling at this late date (like Akira had, doomed to some dim half-life chained to his very killer...) was unacceptable.  But the slick appearance of the bone ramp was just that: an illusion of the swirling light over darkened bone.  And the Treasure was inside... the Treasure was what needed half a dozen locks past the worst prisoner in this hole.  "I wonder what the deepest, darkest wish of humanity's collective hearts is."  
  
And whether the hellscape of Mementos was in contrast or not.  
  
At the base of the ramp, clouds of mist buffeted Akechi and the team with the first true scent they'd had in the prison besides themselves, a fine spray of ashes and salt and copper.  And then... at last, the path ended.  They'd entered a spiralling gap in a panopticon, story after story of stacked cells circling the pit just as they had at the top of the prison.  A basalt floor shone violet in their bloody light, and all the arteries of Mementos fed into a cauldron the size of a house at the very center, flanked by upraised stone hands like Man was drowning under the floor... or beseeching some ancient, hungry god.  
  
They'd reached the bottom of Mementos.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
The cauldron itself was the Treasure, already manifested, no calling card necessary.  Two stories high, several tons of metal and mysterious gears chained to the floor, and lasers.  Their weapons barely scratched the dark metal.  Their Personae barely scratched it... or did they?  
  
No.  It sucked in pulsing energy through the arteries feeding into its bowl, and the metal brightened faintly.  Nothing to do with their Personae at all, except in that the people in the cells were screaming for them to stop.  Just being present, just fighting the thing in their sight... the thieves were inspiring people to offer up their lives freely, begging the cauldron to take from them.  How much energy could one person give before they died?  
  
"Fox."  He wasn't the most agile of the party, but he had the longest blade, the greatest reach.  That cool gaze flickered to Akechi, most of Fox's attention still on the cup.  "The cords.  They need cut."  
  
No questions asked.  Fox slipped out of the lineup and circled around to one of the upraised hand statues, and began to climb.  
  
"You fools."  Akechi startled at the resonant, sourceless voice.  "Humans, yet wishing to eradicate the desires of humanity..."  The cauldron.  The cauldron itself was speaking.  It was sapient.  " _Repent_."  
  
The cauldron was speaking.  The cauldron was controlling its own lasers.  If they could just keep its attention, without wasting their energy on hitting it... hopefully it would monologue and never notice Fox.  "What are you?" Akechi called up warily.  
  
"I am revered as the granter of dreams for all who behold me.  A being most commonly known as the Holy Grail."  
  
Akechi much preferred Sailor Moon's Grail to this... thing.  
  
"The Prison of Regression is representative of the collective desires of humanity."  Oh good.  It _could_ be enticed to monologue.  "They wish to be chained down, surrender their cognition, and neglect the world around them... These feebleminded commonfolk will make your 'social reform' all for naught," it sneered.  "The shared heart of the masses has fallen into an excess of indolence and transformed into a prison."  
  
Akechi inclined his head at the thing.  "A fair assessment, I suppose."  
  
" _Crow_!"  
  
"What?  He's not entirely incorrect."  The team glared at him, aghast.  "People are cruel, lazy, and too easily swept up into stupidity en masse.  I'm not at all surprised that they've created Hell and put an idol of a genie in it."  
  
The Grail gleamed.  "Thus," it purred, approvingly, "The only suitable end for them... is to perish within the prison they wished for themselves."  
  
"Now _that_ ," Akechi saw Fox clamber up onto the top of the statue and ready his sword, "I must disagree with."  
  
The Grail hissed and fired all its lasers... including one that knocked Fox off the statue and to the ground.  Dammit.  
  
The fight continued as fruitlessly as it had before.  The cup brightened further with every energy pulse sucked down the wires, until it was bright gold.  With Fox only halfway up the statue once more, Akechi braced for another round of lasers as the inmates began chanting, "Get out of here."  
  
He'd been hated before.  Zombie chanting, as creepy as it was, didn't even rate next to an orphanage bully, or the troglodytes of the internet.  No one else seemed to feel that way, clustering closer with stricken eyes casting about the walls of the prison.  
  
"If this is really how people feel," Mona murmured, down near Akechi's knees, "There's no way we'll be able to steal their hearts.  We've come here for nothing."  
  
Akechi rolled his eyes.  "What a wonderful thank-you for luring us all down here, cat."  Mona didn't even protest.  "Are you just going to give up, then?  After all the lies, the risks to your lives, _Akira's death_?"  
  
"No!" he yowled.  "But what can we do?!"  
  
"I'm thinking."  Stalling for time.  
  
"You imbeciles are intoxicated by an undesired 'justice'."  Monologuing again.  Perfect.  They needed those damned cords _cut_.  "This is the will of the children of man who have fallen into sloth."  Blah blah blah.  This was just a fancier class of sentai villain.  
  
"Is this really what everyone wants...?" Queen murmured, shaken.  
  
Oh for.  "Does it really matter?  _We_ don't want it."  To hell with the will of the people.  The will of the people made orphanages what they were, and let the Shidos of the world get away with murder.  Akechi risked glancing away from the Grail.  "Isn't that enough?"  
  
She stared.  "That's..."  Her chin firmed up.  "Yes.  That's right."  She turned to glare at the Grail.  "I didn't break free from my sister's expectations just to bend over for _yours_!"  
  
"Wow, Queen," Skull and Oracle said in unison.  " _Crude_ ," Skull added, impressed.  
  
Queen groaned.  "It's not as though it's worth being polite to a genocidal stewpot, you guys."  
  
"Humanity already wishes for their distortions to be actualized," the Grail announced.  ("Oh blow it out your backside!" Skull yelled.)  It ignored him and continued, "I am merely the being that will ultimately grant those wishes.  Now, it is time I refrain from my place in this world, and begin to encroach upon reality itself."  
  
It began to glow a startling blue-violet.  
  
But reality was... it had to be miles up.  The Grail was about to bring the place down around their ears.  
  
Akechi braced himself and yelled up to Oracle, "We need your shield!"  Hopefully it would withstand stone as well as it did magic and gunshots.  
  
The Grail fired.  
  
The floor went white.  
  
The world went white.  
  
The world vanished.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Reality hit like a brick wall.  
  
Slowly, Akechi pushed himself up.  His nose was cold; his hands bare against rough brick; his cognitive uniform lost for loose, warm fleece.  The Grail... the merge... Futaba's shield had held, but where...?  
  
"Look!" Yusuke said.  "We're back in Shibuya!"  
  
"Did we... lose?" Makoto asked.  
  
A drop of reddish water landed on Akechi's hand.  Then another fell, and another, darkening the brick.  He glanced up as Futaba made a soft sound of confusion.  
  
Copper scent.  Warm rain, much too warm for December.  The rain was tainted with blood.  
  
Futaba yelped, and Goro spun to see her leaping back from a bone spiking out of the ground.  More were coming up, some picked clean, some tattered with ragged flesh that'd been invisible in the darkness of Mementos.  They arched over the buildings, spines and spurs against the thickening red clouds.  
  
"Mementos... here?  In Shibuya?" Makoto's voice shook.  
  
The fusion.  Mementos joining reality.  Where was the Grail?  
  
Akechi looked around warily for it -- surely a giant golden cup would be obvious -- but apparently it had come up out of the Metaverse well away from their team, lost somewhere behind the towering buildings.  
  
No one around them seemed to have noticed... anything... though.  Was it because their Shadows knew the sight of Mementos?  Or were they just... 'you see, but do not observe'?  So focused on their petty lives that they had no attention for anything else?  
  
"--Phantom Thieves all about, anyway?" a woman nearby asked.  
  
"Oh man, hearing that brings back memories!" a man laughed.  The Phantom Thieves had been _last week,_ it was far too soon to be talking like that.  "I feel so dumb for ever believing they existed."  
  
Wait, what?  
  
"It was fun news, though," another woman replied.  "Well, I doubt anyone believes they're around anymore."  
  
Believes they're... Mementos was...  
  
Before Goro could catch that train of thought, Futaba swayed.  All thought of Mementos fled as she collapsed, Goro barely catching her on the way down.  "I feel... woozy..." she murmured, small fingers clenching in his sleeve.  
  
No.  No, not his sister.  Was it a delayed status effect?  Was her blood sugar low?  ... Had the shield drained her HP?  
  
What could he do?!  
  
Around him, the rest of the team started dropping like flies, the world starting to spin.  
  
"Don't..." Morgana struggled to say, "tell me..."  
  
The Grail chuckled, sourceless to Goro's ears.  "Indeed.  This isn't my doing," it said smugly.  "You imbeciles are about to disappear from the people's cognition."  
  
Mementos was a cognitive world.  
  
Reality was... cognitive, now.  
  
Futaba Sakura was gleeful cackling and gaming lingo, painted nails flying over a keyboard and long hair shining copper in the setting sun, a stubborn jut to her chin and a hand reaching out.  " _The Sperm Donor's idea of winning is having no family and screwing with people's heads.  Screw that.  You_ are _my brother._ "  
  
Futaba was his little sister, alive and warm and _existing_ in his arms.  
  
She blinked dazed eyes up at him.  "Goro... nii...?" and bubbled into nothingness.  
  
His sister was gone.  
  
The other thieves... Goro looked around... they were gone.  He hadn't even noticed them going.  
  
The cat still lay, flat and pained, up to its nose in the blood-tainted swirling waters.  "I... I'm... sorry..." he wheezed, water bubbling and rippling against its chin.  "The mission's... a failure..."  And he, too, vanished.  
  
Just like Futaba.  
  
Goro closed his eyes and let the shadowy bubbles take him away.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
He woke to blue.  
  
So.  The afterlife was a cell even smaller than those in the Depths.  The walls were padded in deep blue velvet, and the heavy Persona chains manacling his wrists together and a ball to his ankle were polished a glossy black, in complete contradiction to the state of his tattered, striped prison pajamas.  
  
Other than his clothes and the bare, orphanage-quality mattress he sat on, the cell was pristine.  Not a drop of gore or a single spur of bone in sight.  
  
Odd.  He'd thought Hell would look more like Mementos.  
  
Slowly, he rolled off his hard cot, bringing one bare hand to his aching head.  Futaba.  He hadn't even had the chance to touch his sister's hand, skin-to-skin, before she...  
  
... she...  
  
Goro buried his face in his hands.  
  
WHAM!  
  
He startled and fell off the cot, chains rattling, to see a furious little girl glaring through the cell's bars with one Shadow-gold eye.  The other was lost under an embroidered eyepatch, which matched oddly well with the police uniform just a few shades paler than the velvet walls.  
  
"You incompetent prisoner!" she snapped, hitting the bars again with a telescoping riot baton.  
  
"The assistance we provided," Goro jerked to see a second, mirror-image girl, ash-blonde hair in a braid instead of Leia buns, levelling a bitter look on him, "was all for naught."  
  
He couldn't remember very well, but... this second girl's voice was so close to the one that had begged him to take one more chance, staring down the muzzle of his cognitive double's gun.  One more chance, if he just dared reach out for...  
  
 _The twins are mad at me._  
  
Twins.  
  
 _A cushy cell, only the finest in iron manacles and exotic molds on the mattress._  
  
"Akira," Goro managed to say, voice creaking.  "He was _here_."  
  
"And now he's back, no thanks to you!"  Leia-buns looked like she wanted to strangle him.  "You completely wasted him, you lazy, incompetent, useless _failure_!"  She hit the bars a third time.  
  
Deeper in the room outside the cell, the Grail chuckled.  Goro shot to his feet, hissing, and grabbed the bars.  It was here.  The damn thing was here.  
  
The damn thing looked almost like a man, sitting behind an elegant desk on a rug tailor-made to match the room and the girls' eyepatches.  His nose and grin were too long and large to be human, limbs spindly and nigh-useless, head innocuously balding... and his eyes bulged, piercing and bloodshot, like whatever description the sculptor had been working from had forgotten to mention eyelids.  
  
"Humans are more apathetic and more foolish than I had thought them to be," it purred.  
  
" _YOU_ ," Goro thundered, over whatever bullshit the Grail said next.  
  
The shock baton sizzled, snapping his mouth shut.  "Don't talk to our master that way!" Leia-buns yelled.  Braids just frowned thoughtfully down.  
  
"Now, girls," the Grail chided.  "Don't think I don't know about your disobedience as well."  
  
They stiffened and turned, the same set to their shoulders that Goro had seen all too often in the orphanage.  Both in other children and in the mirror.  "M-Master...?" Buns stuttered.  
  
"There was no proscription upon returning the Wild Card," Braids murmured, with the same placating tone that almost covered up the defiance of daring to have an opinion at all.  
  
"Which is why I did not address the matter until now."  That was so very, very pointedly not forgiveness.  The twins, though... the twins might be young enough to not realize that yet.  "Still, even with your interference, attempting to influence Goro Akechi to prevent rather than bring about ruin," _what?!_ , "your attempts have ended in failure.  In accordance to the game's rules, the defeated must pay a price."  
  
Game.  _Game_.  All of this... all of this... was a _game_?  One Goro had been...?  
  
 _Played_.  
  
As... as a _pawn_... to create the hellscape of merging Mementos with reality.  
  
 _He'd_ been the lure and bait.  Not Morgana at all.  
  
The _Grail_ had put the app on his phone, nearly three long years ago.  He _had_ been someone special, someone chosen to change the world, as he'd always thought.  Just... not the way he'd hoped.  
  
All the deaths.  All the lies.  All the... his sister, his sister's mother, _Akira_...  
  
Every shot he'd taken, every Shadow he'd frenzied, every life he'd destroyed.  It had all been to promote the plans of this creature.  This _thing_.  This _monster that had made his sister die_.  
  
"Your life," the beast proclaimed, "is _forfeit_."  
  
The girls visibly startled.  Goro, though... his knuckles whitened, his grip on the bars tightening until he could feel his own pulse in his palms.    
  
Reality.  Wakaba.  Akira.  
  
Futaba.  
  
"I sentence you to be executed."  
  
He'd never planned to be anything else.  Of course his life was forfeit.  
  
But not to this beast.  
  
"You _murder my sister_ ," he snarled, barely noticing his stained prison uniform flicker and burn into his Loki suit.  "You proclaim yourself a god, you _use me as a pawn_ ," Shadow-powerful little hands grabbed at his arms, Buns kicking his feet out from under him as they dragged him from the cell like he weighed nothing, "you have your children _terrified enough of you to commit murder_..." His Personae slipped through his mental grasp like water.  " _And you think you have the right to sentence me?_ "  
  
"God's decree is absolute," the beast said with relish.  Then, to the girls, "Grant that boy a slow death."  
  
They swallowed.  Shoved Goro to the floor before a pair of guillotines.  And turned cold Shadow-gold eyes upon him.  
  
"If," Buns said haltingly, "If that's what our master wishes..."  
  
" _He has no right_ ," Goro hissed.  
  
Braids' expression closed off.  "If our master orders so... then it cannot be helped."  
  
" _Death to the criminal_ ," they chorused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Eleos, btw, is also the daughter of Erebus and Nyx. So obviously I had to have her manifest looking like the P3 female protagonist.  
> \- Yes I transcribed a lot of the dialogue. I am never writing Depths or the endgame boss fights again. Ugh. There's so much you can't change.


	9. Chapter 9

  
They didn't bother to say another word.  Goro reached for his Personae even as Buns lunged, sweeping her baton at him.  Again, the Personae slipped through his fingers, even less substantial than before... all but one.  
  
Buns' hit landed, burning gold and taking nearly a quarter of Goro's health with it.  Long strips of flesh flared hot, tight and prickling, searing where it met untouched skin and muscle... but not enough, not enough that he couldn't push through the ache.  
  
One soul at his fingertips.  Just one, reaching back with teal sparks already fizzing up between them.  "Akira!"  
  
The healing spell poured over Goro, cool and soothing, and then Akira turned his terrible, gentle eyes on the twins.  "Caroline..."  Buns flinched away, baton up defensively.  "Justine."  Braids' gloved fingers tightened on her clipboard.  "You lied to me."  
  
"No," Justine whispered, voice tight with despair.  "You failed-- _you failed!_ "  She ripped a page free, and it fluttered in the sucking vortex of energy that fired a thick laser at Goro and Akira, then exploded into sizzling fire.  
  
"No," Akira replied.  He set one gloved hand on Goro's shoulder, hovered close with teal light pooling in his other hand.  "This was never rehabilitation."  
  
Rehabilitation?  From what...?  
  
Recalcitrant prisoners... escapees without a Palace... "No," Goro murmured, eyes pinned to the girls.  "I think... I think it always has been rehabilitation.  To break everyone to the Grail's yoke... by giving them one shred of hope, one shining focus in reality..."  Okumura's murder by their shining heroes.  Akira's 'suicide' without answers.  Even Shido... even Shido, who so many people had put faith in, only to be sent reeling from yet another blow.  "And destroying it."  
  
"No hope.  No heroes.  No power," Akira agreed.  
  
"And humanity falls into ruin, lifeless puppets in their solitary, personal Hells.  Everyone rehabilitated... everyone reintegrated.  Everyone locked into their place."  
  
The twins stared at them in open horror.  
  
Behind them, the Grail chuckled.  "Very good."  
  
Goro spun (hadn't the beast been smirking between the guillotines just a second ago?!), one hand landing on the butt of his gun.  Would shooting it even do anything?  
  
"M--master...?"  
  
It smirked impossibly wider, then... that entire side of the room darkened, the Grail blackening with it, and it rose to hover like Akira was.  Arms outstretched, fresh blood and shadows swirling thinly around its feet, it turned blazing gold eyes on Goro.  "To think a human would reach the Holy Grail and see through my true identity," it purred, voice echoing much as it had when it was a two-story-high metal cup.  "You've surprised the god that I am once again."  
  
"What--" Caroline sucked in a sharp breath.  "What are you?!"  
  
The twins hadn't known.  They... hadn't lied to Akira, or betrayed him.  _They didn't know what their master was_.  
  
"I am what some may call the Holy Grail," it proclaimed.  "It is more accurate, though, to say that I am a god who responds to desire and holds dominion over man."  Those eyes glowed, pinpricks in darkness.  "I hoped seeing a righteous thief... or a righteous detective," he inclined his head at Goro, "would spur mankind to change their own indolent hearts."  
  
Had he not been listening?  "You did no such thing," Goro snapped.  "Not when you only gave me enough information to terrorize and murder people, and set me loose _two years_ before ensnaring Akira."  How could it be anything but a foregone conclusion?  "You were just playing some sadistic game to overwhelm and exhaust those Shadows who weren't submitting to you in Mementos."  
  
One glowing light flickered, as the beast's eye twitched.  "Be that as it may... the result is as you know.  The masses have made it so none of it has transpired."  
  
Which negated not one whit of Goro's guilt.  Or returned Akira and Futaba to life.  Akira was still a _Persona_...  
  
"Humans should be met with ruin: you brought forth that answer."  The beast had allowed _no other option to result._   "But I am not without mercy."  Yes it was.  "I shall grant you an opportunity to make a deal with me."  
  
A Faustian bargain.  Out of pure curiosity, Goro straightened, folded his arms, and asked curtly, "What."  
  
"Should you wish it," and they were back to the purring, "I shall return the world to its prior state... one rampant with distorted masses."  
  
Goro rolled his eyes.  "And what interest does that have for me?" he asked.  He'd fought against the status quo in secret for years.  Why would he want that back, even if it was better than the cognitive hellscape reality was now?   
  
"The Phantom Thieves will be praised and gain fame... with their leader."  Goro's breath stopped.  "And their detective, and their young hacker.  Alive and well."  
  
Alive and well.  
  
Alive.  And.  Well.  
  
The little sister he never really got to know.  
  
The boy who'd been his star longer than he was able to recognize it.  
  
He carefully didn't look at Akira, hovering at his shoulder, not touching him.  He didn't want to see Akira's expression... whether he was encouraging or not, or even trying not to influence Goro's decision.  Like he trusted him.  
  
Or like he didn't.  Like he thought whatever he did just... wouldn't matter.  
  
Like he was powerless.  
  
"... Anything I want?" Goro asked slowly.  Behind him, the twins gasped.  
  
"Of course," the beast promised.  
  
"Shido's heart changed and him recieving a true trial?"  
  
"Naturally."  
  
"Futaba's mother restored?  All the people I killed and frenzied?"  
  
"A simple matter."  
  
"Hm."  Akechi made a show of considering it.  "That certainly does sound like an excellent offer..."  He gave the beast his best media smile.  "It's a shame I don't believe a word of it."  
  
"What?" it said stupidly.  
  
"What?!" the twins and Akira chorused.  
  
The media smile broadened, the weight of Akechi's sword prominent on his hip and his fingers starting to itch for the heft and thrumming plasma blade of it.  "I believe the phrase is, 'please take your offer and shove it.'"  
  
The beast hissed.  "Such irredeemable foolishness.  You--"  Goro lunged, plunging the blade straight through the thing's chest.  "--choose death for yourself?" it continued, completely unaffected.  Its shining eyes stared into Goro's, and he bared his teeth at the monster.  "Very well.  I have no need for you."  And it vanished from his sword in a swirl of blood and shadows.  
  
Good riddance.  He flicked the sword, though there was no blood or ichor to clean from it, and turned the blade off, as Caroline shouted, "What sort of idiocy was that, inmate?"  
  
"It made me feel better."  
  
The twins looked at each other.  "... Fair enough," Justine murmured.  
  
Blue light flared between them all, at the center of the room.  It was encircled by rings of black chains, which shattered in a blast of white light.  
  
Another beast lay sprawled weakly upon the desk, one hand lifting to his shaking head.  "Oh..." he groaned, in a strange, soft, high voice.  "Oh my... It's been quite a while since I last stepped foot in this place..." he murmured, lifting his gaze to slide over the rug, then up, then to stop on the twins.  His dazed expression cracked, a deep grief softening the harsh line of his eyebrows, the width of his inhuman mouth.  "My child... my sweet Lavenza, what has he done to you?"  
  
The twins clutched at their heads and fell, each to one knee.  
  
"Girls!" the man cried, reaching for them, only to collapse heavily against the desk once more, breathless from the effort.  
  
Caroline recovered faster.  "I finally remember..."  
  
"We were originally one."  Justine met Caroline's lone eye.  
  
"Torn apart by that scoundrel who stole our master's name," Caroline growled.  
  
Their eyes widened.  "Master!"  They pushed themselves to their feet, swaying, Justine a beat behind Caroline as they all but threw themselves at the desk.  The heartbreak in the man's eyes, as they clutched at him with little gloved hands... Goro should look away, but.  But.  
  
This was a loving father.  Inhuman, but... somehow, _somehow_ a father... cupping one little cheek in each hand, one too-long thumb settling carefully next to each eyepatch.  "Oh my girls.  I am so sorry."  
  
This... whatever he was... could be trusted.  
  
He let his hands fall from the twins' faces to their hands, and they stepped aside, letting him see past them.  See Goro... and Akira.  
  
The man rallied well, the grief shuttering away behind a helpful, professional expression.  "Welcome," he said, enough strength mustered that if Goro hadn't seen his return and collapse, he might not have suspected it, "to the Velvet Room.  My name is Igor.  I am pleased to make your acquaintance... at long last."  
  
" _This_ is the rightful master of this Velvet Room," Caroline said.  
  
"He is the true aid on the journey of any Wild Card," Justine added.  
  
Igor bowed, shallow only due to the length of his nose and his positioning at the desk.  "And I have failed you both more than I can ever say."  He did have eyelids, some small, cringing part of Goro noted, trying to ignore the feeling of every drop of blood on his hands and every link in the chains tying Akira to him, as this inhuman, worn-thin, loving father-being bent his misshapen head to him.  "Please... please, for my attendant's sake... forgive this failure one request."  
  
One request?  
  
Akira floated forward, settling one red-gloved hand kindly on Igor's bald head.  "We're going to save the world from ruin," he assured him, when the man looked up and opened pained eyes once more.  
  
But Igor shook his head.  "I would not dare to beg for the world.  That decision is solely yours... the Wild Cards'... and not for me to influence, save to offer my aid when I can.  No."  He drew the twins a step closer.  "But I am too weakened by my long captivity to restore my attendant to herself, and heal the wound she's grown numb to.  Please... I ask nothing else of either of you."  
  
Goro couldn't imagine how they were supposed to do that... until Akira's head twitched, gaze flickering towards the paired guillotines.  
  
"You want us to _kill them?_ "  
  
"No," Akira said sharply.  "No.  That's how they've been making new Personas for me this whole time.  They won't die."  
  
He couldn't know that.  The twins weren't like Akira's Personae.  They were so clearly actual people.  "Akira--"  
  
But Caroline and Justine were beaming.  
  
"Let us reclaim our true form," Justine said, staring happily into her sister's eye.  
  
Caroline nodded, then looked at Goro.  "It's time you returned the favor for us sending the inmate to you."  She smirked, cocky and bright.  "Do it with care!"  And she grabbed Justine's hand and ran to the guillotines, all but skipping, swinging her baton like she was an actual child.  
  
Once positioned behind the guillotines, deep blue shrouds swung over their shoulders like cloaks, they turned one yellow eye each on Goro and Akira.  "Now, fuse us!" they chorused.  
  
Goro felt sick.  "Akira _please_."  _We can't_ , he wanted to say, as the girls bundled themselves up and knelt, sticking their heads through the guillotines' holes.  They were so small they didn't even need to open the stocks up to get through.  
  
Akira took Goro's hands in his own, resting his forehead against Goro's.  "They will be fine," he promised.  "Please.  Trust m--"  
  
"Hurry up already, inmate!" Caroline shouted.  
  
Akira huffed ruefully, almost amused, and backed away.  "I can do it, if you--"  
  
"No."  No.  However many Personae Akira had used these guillotines on... no.  Goro couldn't let Akira have this blood on his hands, if things went wrong.  He swallowed back bile.  "No.  I.  I will manage."  
  
He turned towards the guillotines.  Their blades, raised high and ready, shimmered teal with... _healing spells, please be healing spells, please don't be the blood of Shadows brought to this place_ , Goro thought.  There was only one lever, in the floor just a few steps to the right, holding the lifting crank in place, and he grabbed onto it with shaking hands.  
  
One steadying breath.  
  
 _Please work_.  
  
Goro threw the switch, and the blades dropped in a screech of sparking metal.  
  
The twins' heads burst into shadows and light, the light of hundreds of shining butterflies fluttering into a sphere of blue-tinged white centered before the guillotines, which then flared bright and revealed a child.  
  
Long blonde hair hung free nearly to the hem of her rich blue dress.  A matching headband, edged with black lace and silver butterfly wings on gold flowers.  Bloomers.  Pristine two-tone boots.  A heavy grimoire under one arm, almost too large for her to carry.  Slightly older than the twins, and between her dress and her hair, vibrant enough that it was immediately apparent that the twins had been faded and incomplete.  
  
Smiling sweetly at them, the girl bowed gracefully.  "My name... is Lavenza."  She looked up at Goro with two calm, gentle eyes.  "Thank you for restoring me, and my Master.  I knew my trust in the Wild Cards would not be misplaced."  Her little smile brightened slightly.  "Come.  There is much yet to explain, and much to do."  
  
Lavenza circled behind the desk, to stand at Igor's right hand, and he let Goro see the gratitude cross his face before settling down to business.  Perhaps correctly reading that Goro would not deal well with gratitude for executing children... things.  
  
"Rare is it," the man began, "that I have a guest with such unique power."  
  
Goro stood steady, carefully not cringing, under the man's eerie, sorrowful gaze.  Igor wasn't like Shido or his men, gleeful and calculating at the thought of his power under their command.  He just... seemed to appreciate that it was special.  
  
"As Akira can hold innumerable Personas within his soul... and could, once again, were he free to exercise that power... you, Goro, can as well.  You each hold the Wild Card within you," so that was what it was called, "a source of unfathomable, endless potential," Igor finished, momentarily as awed and delighted as a child explaining Santa Claus.  "However," he sobered.  "While Akira's strength is in the malleability of his heart, the ease in which he can connect with others and make their strength his own... life has reversed the Wild Card you hold, Goro.  Thus you have found that your Personas must be drawn from within the depthless wellspring of your heart.  That is the purpose of Shrive.  It is a last resort for the Wild Card, a lone rock to lift you from the waters of the storm-racked sea."  
  
Lavenza nodded.  "It is also a spell meant to heal one afflicted with a reversed Wild Card.  By giving face and name to the strongest aspect of one's soul, reconciliation becomes possible."  She circled behind Igor, stood on tiptoe, and peered at the topmost paper on the stack on his desk.  "You have shriven a surprisingly high number of Personas for how long you've had the spell," she said approvingly, glancing back up at Goro. "Have you learned how to induce the proper state of mind to cast it, then?"  
  
"... Induce?" Goro echoed.  He'd figured out there was... not exactly a proper state of _mind_ , but heightened emotion, the surge of power that came with some new revelation, and enough time unthreatened to summon Akira... the spell seemed to tear free under its own power when those three conditions were met.  
  
Lavenza and Igor shared a look.  Then Igor dropped his gaze and inclined his head to the girl, and she circled to the front of the desk, clutching the grimoire to her chest.  
  
"There have been enough revelations since your arrival here to have brought you to a turning point on your journey," she informed Goro, soft and strong.  "Do not mull over the question, but: What is the first thing that comes to mind about them?"  
  
"That I didn't stab that thing enough," popped out of Goro's mouth.  
  
She smiled.  "Then that is what will come forth, should you wish to try."  
  
Another Persona would only help in the fight against the Grail.  He glanced at Akira, though.  He'd... never actually asked Akira.  After that first time, where Akira had goaded him into it, and had probably quite rightly wanted to hurt Goro... before sharing his dreams, seeing the horrors Goro lived with... he'd only ever commanded.  And begged, just the once, for Eleos.  
  
He'd forced Akira to carve into his chest, five times over, and had forgotten Akira might feel like he had Goro's blood on his hands as much as Goro had his, and the twins', and so many other people's.  
  
Akira nodded.  "Maybe it won't hurt as much."  
  
Lavenza's head snapped up.  "It shouldn't hurt."  
  
"Calm, my dear," Igor murmured.  "Catharsis may be difficult, for one so poorly done by.  But this time..."  His strange, bloodshot eyes seemed to peer into Goro's soul.  "No, this time should not cause much pain."  
  
Shouldn't.  Not won't, not a guarantee, but... even if Igor had informed him it would hurt, that forcing the Shrive on purpose would be the worst he'd ever felt, he needed more powers to face the Grail.  
  
He couldn't just let the beast go free.  
  
Goro closed his eyes, focusing on the memory of the beast.  The scorched darkness with its lamplit malevolent eyes.  The beast that had murdered his sister.  That had manuvered Akira to his death.  That had toyed with him since he was just a hungry little thing shipped off to yet another, crummier, poorer orphanage, far too close to where jaded working girls plied their trade, and police sirens wailed in the night, because why waste money on the unadoptable kids.  
  
He'd wanted to be his own hero.  
  
The beast had watched and laughed as he became his own villain.  
  
And then it had the _gall_ to offer him the world, his sister's life and Akira's, Wakaba's, the adoration of the masses, as if Goro hadn't already proven himself the greatest danger to it all.  An offer to become his willing puppet once more, this time knowingly.  To destroy the world in some more subtle way, leave it as it was in the days leading up to its merge, with no promise that it would never drag Mementos into reality once it figured out how to blind Goro's eyes.  
  
There wasn't even any way to guarantee it would truly be the world, and not some illusion placed in Goro's mind while he sat catatonic in pride-of-place in the beast's lair, his life being siphoned into the cup's own.  
  
 _Never_.  
  
Goro's heart thumped in his chest.  
  
 _Do you hear me, beast?  I will never submit!  I will never let you run free!  You_  
  
\- _cannot_ -  A whisper joined his mental shout, then rose.  
  
- _escape!_  
  
 _I am thou,_ a woman thundered, her voice bolstered by the distant cries and sword clashes of an ancient army at war.  _Thy retribution is at hand_.  
  
 _Vow unto me, thou who hast returned to the path of justice.  Vow unto me, and speak my name._  
  
" _Adrestia_."  
  
Goro barely felt the blade at all.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Adrestia looked rather a lot like Xena, Warrior Princess, if her leathers had been white and her hair red and edged in flames.  She carried a bronze sword on her hip, and held a double-headed ball-and-chain weapon like it was the scales of justice.  
  
"A most impressive Persona," Igor said, as Adrestia vanished and imprinted her abilities into Goro's mind.  Fire, curse, nuclear.  No weaknesses.  A new, powerful Strike ability: Nemesis' Scourge.  "However, it may yet prove difficult to win against him with your power alone."  
  
Goro's heart sank.  He wasn't good enough?  Even now?  Should he have tried for a Persona with electricity...?  
  
Lavenza's expression went fierce.  "You must release your teammates, with whom you've shared your conviction."  
  
His... his teammates?  Akira's teammates?  (Akira's face reflected Goro's shock almost perfectly, hope dawning like the sun.)  Futaba was alive.  _Futaba_ was _alive_.  
  
Igor chuckled kindly.  "This place exists between dream and reality, mind and matter."  Aleph- _i_ space.  Just as Wakaba had written.  Igor looked towards Goro's cell, whose door, Goro belatedly recalled, had shattered in that furious moment when the twins were dragging him out of it.  
  
"They have not necessarily expired yet," Lavenza said.  "Just as you were trapped here, they should be confined somewhere as well.  However..." She hesitated, biting her lip.  "... a Persona cannot safely traverse the deeper halls here.  And you do not hold Akira's deep bonds to the Phantom Thieves.  I am uncertain if you will be capable of releasing them."  
  
But his sister.  
  
"Forgive my attendant," Igor murmured.  "She is young and learning."  He smiled gently.  "You may not hold the same deep bonds to others that Akira does... however, I have confidence that you will discover your own connections to use."  
  
Akechi straightened.  "I suppose I must at least try."  
  
The back of his cell had faded away, leaving a corridor lit dimly grayish-blue at the end.  The light, as he approached, seemed to blue further as the colors of the Velvet Room were left behind, until Akechi stepped into a vaulted space and found the light was a soft film covering a steep staircase, devoid of railings and untouched in the center of the room.  Was he supposed to climb it...?  
  
No.  Red in the corner of his eye called his attention to a hallway, running off to the left.  There was another mirrored to the right.  
  
Most people would turn left.  
  
Akechi turned right.  
  
The faint pools of light in the hall weren't Mementos-scarlet, but a softer shade that would've looked almost violet in that hellscape.  A side hallway led deeper in, but Akechi didn't take it yet: he continued through the doorless barred walls, the stone solid to either side, until... blue light.  
  
A cell.  
  
Makoto stood in it, leaning against the velvet-padded wall, and only slowly lifted her head when Akechi tapped at the steel bars to catch her attention.  
  
"Oh," she said listlessly.  "It's you."  
  
This... wasn't Queen.  It wasn't even the stiff-backed, brittle President from so few months ago, who would never dare show this sort of... near-catatonic, broken despair.  
  
(There had been a few children like that in the small orphanage Goro spent most of middle school in.  Girls a little older than him, recent orphans... only one had survived taking high school entrance exams, only to suicide when she failed.)  
  
How was he supposed to connect to a kind of Makoto he'd never even seen?  
  
"You were right," she murmured, eyes on her feet.  "I should've just stayed a good-girl pushover."  Silence.  Goro had no idea what to say.  "... But then, I suppose I would've just disappeared already.  My sister has to focus on her work."  
  
"... She would miss you," Goro tried.  
  
"She wouldn't remember me."  Makoto didn't sigh.  She didn't seem to have the energy to.  "It'd be better that way."  
  
... That definitely wasn't like Makoto.  "Excuse me, I came here looking for the teammate whose face you've borrowed," Akechi said flatly.  "Would you happen to have seen her?  Looks just like you, gets tense as a coiled spring under pressure, makes it very obvious she's going to snap instead of fold when some idiot pushes hard enough?  Called the Grail a genocidal stewpot within earshot of it?"  
  
Makoto snorted, the scarcest puff of laughter.  "I... did do that, didn't I."  
  
"No you didn't, Niijima did."  Akechi scoffed. " _You_ clearly aren't her."  
  
She pinned him with an incredulous stare.  "Yes I am."  
  
"Hm." Akechi pretended to consider her for a moment.  She was starting to show signs of life... maybe he could fan the flames with sheer irritation?  "I don't think so.  The Niijima I know took charge of a dispirited team and kept going in the face of death."  
  
"Well maybe the Niijima you know was a mistake!"  
  
"No.  My initial assessment of that Niijima as a pushover-- _that_ was a mistake."  Hm... How could he really offend her?  The pushover comment had certainly made an impact... but it wasn't just the words.  He did recall the day he'd said it, and more importantly, the circumstances that would've brought him to say that to her face: a bad day had combined with Makoto's good fortune in having a sister who cared enough to keep her out of the system, and some sado-masochistic wish to get hit and be able to ruin the lucky orphan's life had reared its ugly head...    
  
He knew _exactly_ the demeanor that had hit so hard.  
  
"Well, I say mistake, but."  He grinned, bright and appealing as the gold inlaid on a prince's dagger.  "The Dreamy Detective Prince is so _very_ sweet and gentle, he couldn't _possibly_ be saying cutting, sexist things on purpose."  
  
"... What?"  
  
"And he's so _insightful_ , so _innocent_ and _virtuous_."  He cocked a finger-gun at her, 'fired', and winked, using tricks of his perfect media personality to hit right at her knowledge that he was a hardened murderer.  "Why, it _must_ be true!"  
  
"You..." she growled.  She turned towards the bars, fists clenching.  "How dare you."  
  
He mocked surprise.  "Oh, did I hit a nerve?"  
  
"You know damn well you did, you calculating little bastard!"  She grabbed for him through the bars, and he danced out of reach.  
  
"Oh, come on, Niijima!" he laughed mockingly.  "I'm armed, you're not--" Queen's costume burst into existence, belying that in an instant, "--and _I'm_ not the one who's confined!"  
  
The door glowed and shattered.  Queen tackled him before the last shard of steel faded away.  
  
 _This was a stupid idea_ , Akechi thought, instinctively bracing for impact.  
  
Her punch hit the stone floor right next to his head, sparks flying from her brass knuckles to scatter in white-hot-gone pinpricks across his face.  "You calculated me out of that cell.  Fine.  Here I am."  Her eyes narrowed as she leaned over him.  "Now _what do you want?_ "  
  
Akechi told her.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
One down.  Six more to go.  
  
Yusuke was in the next hall.  "Oh.  It's you," he said, almost exactly as Makoto had.  
  
Anger.  Anger and offense.  It'd worked on Makoto... but Yusuke only really spoke art.  Akechi really, really didn't.  
  
Oh well.  Give it his best shot.  
  
"It's me," Akechi agreed.  He peered into the cell.  "What a dismal place.  But I suppose you're used to such accomodations."  Yusuke only shrugged.  "Rather a different palette and materials than Madarame's shack, but... I can see the resemblence."  
  
"... Resemblence...?"  
  
"Dank little hole for the students, with one incongruous, gaudy note.  Of course, all this velvet is much more subtle than that ridiculous peacock door.  How anybody could be so delusional as to think a man of celebrated refinement and taste would put _that_ door in a crumbling old shack..."  
  
"Delusional... yes..." Yusuke let his head fall back, staring helplessly towards the ceiling.  "I am such a fool."  
  
"I wonder what you're being deluded about now."  
  
Yusuke blinked slowly.  "Now...?"  His gaze dropped, brow furrowing.  "... now..."  
  
Was that a spark of curiosity in his eyes?  Perhaps... perhaps.  But how to annoy it into life...?  Maybe if he accused Yusuke of being a lazy talentless hack, what else would Madarame produce, yes the works he'd stolen from Yusuke were hailed as priceless contributions to the art world but what did critics know anyway...?  
  
Too risky.  But what else could he say...?  
  
How on earth did Akira ever manage to talk to this guy?  
  
"La chambre bleu... Picasso..." Yusuke muttered.  Then, "Where _are_ we?"  
  
Akechi stared.  "They call it the Velvet Room," he answered carefully.  Was Yusuke coming out of it on his own?  "Aleph- _i_ space.  A dimension almost, but not entirely, unlike Mementos."  
  
"And thus in aesthetic opposition to it?" Yusuke mused.  "'The Velvet Room.'  How evocative.  Is it a Palace, then?  Are you demanding I join you in yet another futile quest against its ruler?"  
  
Futile.  _No do not slip back into that_ \--  "Hardly," Akechi scoffed.  "But are you really content to sit here and moulder?  In silence?  In _monochrome_?  Not so much as a finger lifted to stroke patterns onto your walls?"  
  
Yusuke gave him a look that was almost sharp.  "And what good would that do?  Art is a statement."  Ephemeral planes of foxfire traced the line of fox ears, the ghostly shade of his suit's dark blues a stain from bust to toes.  "It is _useless_ to merely speak to myself."  
  
Akechi straightened, took a step back from the door, and gestured sharply at the floor where he'd stood.  "So _get out here and start talking_."  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Yusuke's hall didn't connect to the part of the Velvet Room on the far side of the stairs.  Akechi backtracked and took the side route to a third corridor, where he found a third cell.  
  
Ann, at least, said something different when she looked up from her dejected seat on the floor.  "So.  I'm not in heaven after all."  
  
"Not hell, either," Akechi told her flatly.  "Though I wonder that you could've thought this depressing hole to be at all heavenly."  
  
She shrugged.  "It's quiet.  No fire or demons."  Her head sunk more heavily against her knee.  "I guess this means the hell that Shibuya turned into was all real."  
  
Logic, thy name is not Ann Takamaki.  Not being in an afterlife did not automatically mean Mementos had merged with Shibuya.  But, "It is."  
  
"So everything we did was... pointless," she murmured, voice thick with tears.  
  
They weren't done yet.  "Was it?" Akechi asked.  "If no one had ever become a Phantom Thief, what would've happened to you?"  
  
Ann went very, very still.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
The far end of the back hall, opposite Ann, held Haru.  Akechi slowed as he approached.  This one... this one would be easy.  
  
By the sudden tension in her shoulders, Haru was clearly aware of him, but she didn't look up even when Akechi tapped at her cell door.  
  
She was ignoring him.  
  
That would not last long.  
  
Akechi leaned against the wall opposite her, facing her, and crossed his arms.  With a slight adjustment of his stance, he was The Impudent Detective Prince that he'd only used a couple of times on arrested criminals.  "Did you know," he said conversationally, "that you're a prime suspect in your father's case?"  
  
She twitched.  "W-what?"  Wide, startled eyes met his, and he smirked.  
  
"A multi-million dollar motive and enrollment at Shuujin Academy," where the thieves were rightfully suspected to be among the student body.  "Of course, if the police knew who your friends were," all but one of them victims of the Phantom Thieves' targets, "and paid attention to how many -- and what kind -- of charges had been mysteriously dropped against your fiance..." the scumbag, "... excuse me, ex-fiance.  My, what convenient timing, that."  
  
"How--" Haru's clothing flared up into her Noir suit, and she flung herself against the bars.  "How _dare_ you!"  
  
Akechi let the Insolent Prince drain away.  "Now that I have your attention."  And he explained, in small words (with a few attention-keeping expletives) about how the Grail had been leading them all around by the nose for months, how it had been toying with humanity through Goro, uninformed and alone, for years... how Futaba's mother and Haru's father were dead because the _fucking stewpot_ got _bored_.  "I'm not asking you to ever forgive me for killing your father," Akechi finished, Haru seething audibly.  "All I'm asking is that you come help take down the beast that gave me the power to."  
  
Her answer was a foregone conclusion.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Three cells to go.  Except if the layout was symmetrical, there should only be two left.  Who was missing?  
  
 _Please, not Futaba.  Let her be in the next cell._  
  
But no.  Blond hair and a purple jacket.  
  
"Come t'kill me too, huh?" Ryuji asked bitterly.  
  
Wait, what?  "You've figured out we aren't dead?"  
  
"Yeah yeah, who would've thought a moron like me would clue in."  Ryuji glared halfheartedly at him.  "Akira talked about this place a few times.  Recurring dreams.  He stopped pretty quick when it all freaked Mona out, but... sometimes he just had to hear he wasn't completely bugfuck nuts.  So I'd tell him, even though I kinda thought he was.  But all this Metaverse shit, it coulda been real."  He leaned back against his padded wall.  "And here we are.  Completely lacking in bugfuck."  
  
"... How are you the sanest person in here?" Akechi asked.  
  
"Well what's whining about it gonna do?"  Ryuji waved a bit at himself.  "So do I gotta stand up, or can you just shoot me here?"  
  
"I take back that comment about sanest."  Akechi rubbed a hand against his forehead and sighed.  Akira's damn idiot friends.  "I'm not here to kill you."  
  
"... What?"  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
One last hall.  One last cell, if the corridors were mirrored and his spatial sense was at all reliable here.  Which it might not be.  Who knew what sort of... of dimensional folding was in place that made this part of the Velvet Room so inhospitable to Personae?  
  
... Akechi turned left instead of right, and walked to the end of the hallway just to check that it actually did return to the space with the glowing stairwell in it.  Which, it did.  
  
(The staircase was solid all the way to the floor.  Maybe it hid a final cell...?  There was enough space for one, particularly since the hallway with the boys didn't connect across, but... it didn't connect across.  He would have to go looking for a hidden door halfway between Haru and Ann's cells to find it, if one was hidden under the staircase.)  
  
He turned back to check that final cell, with its 50/50 chance of being the cat.  
  
The sheer relief when it wasn't the cat... when Goro found his sister crouched gloomily against the wall, hair seeming closer to his own shade than hers in the sourceless blue light, alive and whole... Goro sank to his knees next to the bars and didn't even try to pretend it was just so that she didn't have to crane her neck up to look at him.  
  
Not that she... looked at him.  
  
"... Futaba?"  He couldn't tell if this was like Haru's deliberate snub, or if Futaba was... just unable to muster up the effort to bother.  Why couldn't he have gone left, like most people would, and found her first?  (It wasn't too late, it couldn't be too late, it _couldn't_.)  "... Little sis?"  
  
After a long moment, she turned dull eyes on him.  "Huh," she murmured, and even that seemed to take most of her energy.  This wasn't right, where was the bouncy, smirking little hacker that leapt for Goro's phone and play-shouted like an ogre for her supper?  "You care."  
  
"I... yes, I care."  He sounded like a Care Bear movie.  
  
"Oh."  She looked back at the floor stones.  "Weird."  
  
... How was it weird?  They may have only known for a few hours, but... "But we're family."  Blood was supposed to be so important that people spent millions of yen and risk a woman's life with IVF, rather than adopt.  Normal people, even.  Not people like... like the donor.  
  
"We're _related_ ," Futaba muttered.  "That doesn't make family."  
  
Goro rocked back on his heels.  His eyes burned; his throat went suddenly tight.  "I thought..."  Except... that had been when she was powering through everything between them, through his culpability for her mother and Akira, and accepting him out of pure spite.  
  
Spite was a powerful force.  It had gotten Akechi through the orphanages, had him survive junior high and bother with entrance exams, pushed him through dozens of murders until he sometimes could taste nothing but gunpowder in the air...  
  
And then, when Shido was gone and he'd had no specter of his delinquent father to defy... he'd just... collapsed.    
  
Spite needed something to drive it.  
  
Futaba... didn't have the energy.  
  
What was left, when you didn't have spite anymore?  
  
Goro didn't know.  Akira... Akira would, but... Akira couldn't come back here.  Not as he was.  He couldn't reach out to Futaba as her chosen brother, her--  
  
... her chosen... family.  
  
"Don't you want your family back?" Goro tried.  "Soujiro?"  
  
Her breath hitched.  "... He's better off without me."  
  
( _Your father is better off without us_ , his mother had said once, her arms going painfully tight around Goro, until he couldn't even cry with her and a sleep monster had swallowed him whole.)  
  
"Like _hell_ he is!"  Futaba jumped when Goro hit the cage door.  "He's lost your mother, and Akira, and even the damn cat, and you think he's going to be _better off?_   He's all alone now, Futaba!  Just like me!"  No mother, no father, no sister.  "And just. like. _you!_ "  
  
" _No!_ "  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
Goro had an armful of ranting little sister pinning him to the floor.  
  
"-- and then I'm gonna sell those bits to a _smelter_ and make him into _bedpans_ \--" She bounced heavily on his stomach, arms flailing.  Apparently Futaba had no sense of personal space when she got mad enough.  And apparently, trying to rip her from her family and dump her right back into clinical depression hit 'mad enough'.  "But I'll keep a bit for shoe heels.  You wanna walk all over the Grail's stupid face, Goro-nii?"  Goro warmed as she smirked down at him.  "I can hook us up."  
  
He'd take just obliterating the beast, but walking on it until his shoes fell apart sounded nice too.  "We'll have to take up hiking," Goro mused.  "I'm sure there are swamps that the beast needs a thorough introduction to."  
  
She beamed.  "I like your style, padawan."  
  
Goro didn't get a chance to answer.  Or ask Futaba to get off him.  Lavenza's voice rang, soft and sourceless, through the corridor.  
  
"It seems you have managed to save all your teammates," she said.  "Now then, please gather in this room at once."  
  
Futaba stilled.  "Goro... who was that?" she asked, eyeing the ceiling warily.  
  
"One of the proprietors of this place," Goro answered, his mind racing.  He'd gathered all the human members of the team, yes, but...   
  
What about the cat?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Goro and Akira can share a Velvet Room because Goro is a reversed Wild Card. Like electrons in a shell, you can have up to two because they will have opposite spins. PHYSICS!  
> \- I'm kind of screwing around with given names, since I've only used suffixes for, like, ONE person in this entire fic oops. So by now it sounds weird to have proper formalities taken.  
> \- Jossing a reviewer, sorry not sorry. Fascinating bunny there though! (I doubt I'll write it, though, not that I would presume permission. I feel Goro's been kicked around enough by canon.)  
> \- "most people would turn left" is actually not universal. Studies have shown that the direction people tend towards depends upon which side of the road the nation drives on. So, in America, the tendency is to turn right, and often stores will be set up like this for crowd control or to direct people to sales. In Japan, of course, the driving side is the left, and so in Japan people tend left.  
> \- don't use metal in hiking shoes. Metal is heavy and inflexible, you want minimal weight and something that'll let your foot move naturally.  
> \- at the very end, Futaba says "Goro-nii" and then "Goro" like two sentences later. She dropped the "-nii" because sudden wariness when voice reminds her she's outside her comfort zone. That is my story and I'm sticking to it.


	10. Chapter 10

  
Akira glanced up with a tiny smile when Goro returned, then caught a flying Oracle in his arms and spun off her momentum.  The others streamed past Goro with the same relieved joy bright in their faces, paying no attention when the burning chains attaching Akira to Goro rematerialized, streaming harmlessly through their bodies.  
  
"You're all right," Akira said simply as they clustered around him, patting at whatever parts of him they could reach, making sure he was real.  
  
Goro stepped as close as he felt comfortable with, leaving the nearest of the group just outside his personal space, folding his hands behind his back.  "For a given definition, I suppose," he reported.  "No one was in any state to summon their Persona when I found them."  
  
"Ugh, yeah!" Oracle agreed.  "This place _sucks_ , Joker."  
  
Behind the group, Igor chuckled ruefully, startling them all into glancing at him.  "My sincerest apologies for that."  
  
Queen edged a little bit in front of Akira.  "Who're they...?"  
  
"My name is Igor," the proprietor purred.  "I am the master of the Velvet Room.  And this," he gestured with well-hidden effort, "is Lavenza."  
  
The girl inclined her head.  "I am a resident of this place as well.  We have been waiting for all of you."  
  
Skull edged closer to Akira as well.  "Dude...?" he asked warily.  
  
"It's fine," Akira answered.  
  
"My master has just been released from a long period of imprisonment," Lavenza said, and Skull's battle-readiness drained from his shoulders.  "His powers have not fully returned.  Though it may be presumptuous of me, I will speak on his behalf--"  
  
"Hey," Panther interrupted.  "Where's Morgana?"  
  
Irritation ghosted over Lavenza's face at the interruption.  But she calmly asked, "Would you like to see him?"  
  
Goro blinked.  But it was Skull who blurted, "You know him?!"  
  
"Yes."  She tipped her chin towards one of the cells, the only one with a cot and toilet inside.  "He's right over there," she said as the cat came out.  
  
"That's where you were hidin'?" Skull asked.  
  
Mona looked away glumly.  "I... was born here."  But wait, hadn't he said he'd been born outside the quarantine cell?  Inside Mementos?  "It was to dispel an evil being from man's spiritual world..."  
  
Clearly that hadn't worked.  
  
Mona looked up more firmly.  "My role was to find a Trickster and help him defeat it!  That's why I was created here by my master."  
  
"So," Goro murmured thoughtfully, catching everyone's attention even as they started to look at Igor.  "You were lure and bait, after all."  ("H-hey!")  "Just not for malicious intent, as I spent much of the Depths suspecting."  
  
Mona bristled.  "Malevolent--!  You--!"  He hissed and spat, yowling so close to catlike even like this that it was difficult to understand him.  "When this place was about to be taken over by that cheating bastard, my master gathered the last traces of mankind's hope and spent his remaining strength to make me!"  
  
Lavenza glared at Goro.  "The entity that calls itself a god is a a malevolent will that forces man into everlasting servitude," she informed him -- them -- flatly.  "It hopes to attain eternal peace by filling reality with those who have stopped thinking for themselves.  ... That is the ruin of man that this evil god envisions."  
  
Skull rubbed his head.  "Iiiii... um... don't get what you're sayin' at all."  
  
"Be quiet and listen!" Lavenza snapped, stomping one little foot.  "We don't have much time left!"  
  
"Wait a moment.  The Holy Grail is... a 'god'?" Queen asked, thinking.  "I was wondering why it had a will of its own, but are you implying that it isn't a Treasure?"  
  
"No," Lavenza replied.  "As the distorted desires of the masses, it is most certainly the core of Mementos itself."  
  
Noir finally spoke.  "Then... did the Treasure become a god because people wished to be ruled over...?"  
  
The child nodded.  "That is correct."  
  
"That's not entirely accurate," Goro said, getting an even sharper glare from Lavenza.  "I would propose that it became... a being... at all because people..."  How to explain it?  "... They come home from work at the end of the day tired, or they catch the flu, or they have had it up to here with their homework or other people, and they just want to be able to drop their responsibilities temporarily and _rest_.  It became a god simply because of how many of those people there are at any given time."  
  
Lavenza made a noise a little bit like a tea kettle.  " _In any case_ , to decide the fate of the world, it chose two people with potential and pitted them against each other.  One -- you, Goro Akechi -- incited the masses' distortion.  Had you won, the world would've been destroyed and remade.  The other was a Trickster who would stand up against this... That was Akira."  
  
"If he won," Mona said, "the human world would be left as is... Those were the conditions of the game-- at least, that's what should've happened."  
  
Huh.  "Did it cheat by attacking the Velvet Room in the first place rather than mentoring me, or by mentoring Akira?" Goro asked.  
  
Everyone gave him somewhat confused looks.  
  
"I mean... was this so-called 'game' supposed to be him, having mentored me, versus Igor, having mentored Akira?"  
  
Igor's face was terrible at expressing dismay.  "No... oh goodness, _no_..."  
  
"We never agreed to any such game at all!" Lavenza sputtered.  "We were preparing the room to recieve _you_ as a guest when he attacked!"  
  
"It is a peculiarity of the Velvet Room that we could glean this much of his plans during his attack upon us," Igor explained.  More like a peculiarity of their species, Goro suspected.  He wasn't entirely sure he believed them, either.  
  
"If you could _stop derailing the discussion_ ," Lavenza said, "That malevolent being knew that a revolution would not occur within indolent humans.  After all, it is the masses' distorted desires incarnate.  However, my true master believes in humanity.  He believed that a Trickster would rise among the people and accomplish this change.  But that evil entity laughed at the prospect, and sought to prove the powerlessness of man with the game.  And Akira had great potential... which is why it approached him.  It helped train the Trickster, only to cast him into despair, using the masses who rejected their savior."    
  
And then kill him, using Akechi.  His so-called champion.  
  
"This was likely its means to nip in the bud anything that would pose a threat.  However..."  Lavenza smirked.  "Even though I was separated, I was able to sometimes push though to myselves -- to Justine somewhat more easily than Caroline, but sometimes -- and I managed to realize that... if it could cheat?"  Her little teeth gleamed very, very white and sharp in the Velvet Room's cool light.  " _So could I._  
  
"I managed to send Akira to you, in the hopes that, since that malevolent entity had stolen humanity's champion, we would be able to steal his own.  You, Goro Akechi."  
  
So, he was a gamepiece again.  
  
"Your success -- and life -- are no longer humanity's fall."  Her smile brightened.  
  
... Maybe he could live with being a gamepiece.  
  
"And this means that there is still hope."  She sobered.  "Your real world has already been fused with Mementos.  You do not exist because reality is replete with the cognition of those who deny the Phantom Thieves.  It can be said that the world is one step away from the evil god's machinations."  What was hopeful about that?  All she'd managed was to blanket the group in a pall of gloom.  "Goro Akechi."  Apparently it was time to gamepiece up.  "The public still believes you exist.  If you do not will it, you will not disappear if you leave this prison."  
  
... He'd... _willed_ himself to die, when Futaba seemed to?  
  
... He _had_ just deduced that the beast was created by the sheer number of people who got tired and sick of the world under enough stress.  Hadn't he just spent most of the previous two weeks like that, exhausted and numb in the wake of escaping Shido, and then in the wake of defeating him?  And then... in Shibuya... he'd let the darkness take him.  He'd _let_ it, no struggling or screaming like everybody else.  
  
"Yes," Lavenza purred.  "And furthermore, with your strength of will, and the bonds you have built in gathering the team, and the expansion of your heart that you now carry nine Personas... you can hold the entire team's existence intact against the weight of the public's cognition."  
  
He _what?_  
  
Lavenza went fierce.  "Only you can leave this prison, and save this distorted world and its captive people!"  
  
"Yeah!" Skull cheered.  "Let's destroy that annoying, shiny Treasure jerk for sure this time!"  
  
But... Goro hadn't actually agreed to... oh, _fine_.  It wasn't as if he didn't want to punch the beast in the face and have it actually _work_ , anyway.  He shared a look with Akira.  "I'll see you outside."  
  
Akira nodded and dispelled.  
  
"Excellent," Igor murmured, clapping slowly.  "There is nothing to fear.  You alrady possess the strength to oppose this evil god."  He chuckled.  "I am truly looking forward to this."  
  
"Our mutual friend knows where the exit is.  Morgana?"  Lavenza bowed.  "Please guide them."  
  
Goro completely failed to be surprised when the cat led them back to and up the softly-glowing stairs, past tiers of heavy stone, and finally to a wall that stretched off into the darkness on both sides and straight up.  A lone door sat in this wall: a perfect match to the quarantine door, unbarred and unrecessed, with a single red bulb set in the top of the steel arch.  
  
"What's this..?" Skull muttered.  "It's one hell of a door..."  
  
"I believe it's the quarantine door we saw in Mementos," Goro said.  "Which rather makes sense, given the beast's idea of the most terrible criminals."  He set a hand on the door, and something deep inside the steel unlatched itself with a heavy clunk.  "We who would defy it.  Shall we?"  
  
Outside, was... outside.  Dark under roiling red clouds, which spat blood rain in lone drops too sporadic to even be called a drizzle, Shibuya Square seemed... emptier than it should, at whatever time of day this was.  Debris lay in jagged heaps where once there had been trees and street gutters, and a rotting rib cage easily a quarter kilometer wide soared over it all.  
  
The door behind them stood set into a mound of rocky mud that looked far healthier than the rest of this place.  A red-painted rebar sign above the arch read 'Velvet Prison'.  
  
"It seems like people still haven't realized that this abnormality has taken over the city," Queen said in exasperation.  
  
"Um..." Oracle's voice wavered.  "More importantly, look at Mona!  He's shining!"  
  
The cat was, indeed, glowing golden-white... though not so much from his flesh as from a nimbus around him.  He shrugged.  "It's probably because my memories have returned," he said easily, unconcerned.  "I know what my duty is now."  
  
Something about that almost seemed like a step backwards, but Goro didn't have much chance to wonder about it.  He'd been ignoring the milling crowd, since they were oblivious to them, but he abruptly, involuntarily tuned in when he caught his name.  
  
"--Akechi?" a man was saying.  "Over there, near the shining thing.  What's with his outfi-- wait a sec.  What's with those weirdly-dressed guys?  There's a bunch of them!"  
  
And now they were all getting stared at.  Not by the entire crowd, but by a significant minority, increasing quickly as they stopped and blocked other people's paths.  
  
"That girl!" a woman said.  "Wasn't she on the jumbotron last week?  The... what was it?  Something about Shido-- the Phantom Thieves!"  
  
"Oh man, that's right!  I completely forgot about them!"  
  
The crowd was starting to murmur louder.  They didn't have time for this.  "Mona," Goro said, pretending to be oblivious to the growing audience.  "Where to?"  
  
"Over there!" Mona said.  ("The shining thing spoke!  What the--?!")  He pointed towards a corner of the square, next to the scramble, where the debris flattened out atop a spine that rose sharply away from the asphalt, snaking between two buildings and disappearing in the bloody fog.  Lights glowed red past that... aha.  Goro had almost missed it, since its red-on-red was almost invisible and it had replaced a similarly round building in the skyline, but the Grail's damn temple was there.  
  
The Velvet door behind them had locked itself again, the same heavy clunk seeming much quieter against the noise of a somewhat bustling city street, but Lavenza stood off to one side of where the spine broke through asphalt, the blue of her dress almost too bright to be real.  A cell door glowed softly on her other side, mist drifting cool and soothing-looking around its base, and she smiled when they passed.  
  
"I wouldn't have regained my true form if not for you," she murmured, as Goro slowed.  "In order to repay that debt, allow me to assist you and your teammates here.  Please come to me if you are injured.  I will heal your wounds."  
  
"Thank you," Goro replied.  Hopefully they wouldn't need to take her up on that... or, more likely, hopefully the path to the temple had the same sort of teleport as a normal Palace did, and they could return quickly without having to fight their way back down.  
  
It didn't look like the closely-packed bones of the spine path would hold underfoot, and Goro half-expected them to crunch into dust and splinters underfoot like a rotting, termite-ridden old deck -- or for the crowd left behind to start yelping about his sudden ability to step up into thin air, since they weren't screaming about the fact of horrific demonic bones and blood everywhere -- but nothing happened.  It was almost like just walking up a ramp over the street, cars driving blithely under the bones and glistening tendons as if it was just a low-set and particularly macabre bridge that the drivers saw every day.  Or, rather, didn't see.  Just... ribs and gibbets and rotting bone, and teenagers in wild cosplay walking not even a handspan above their heads.  Nothing of any note here.  
  
"Can you see that further in?" Mona asked, pointing.  "That's the temple."  
  
"It's nice knowin' there aren't gonna be any bullshit traps or nothing this time!" Skull crowed.  
  
Oracle and Panther groaned.  "You just _had_ to jinx us," Oracle said.  
  
"Aw, come on!  We already know everything, what else can he trick us with?"  
  
" _Ryuji!_ " Panther said.  
  
"What'd I say?!"  
  
Goro tuned out the petty argument, looking out over the skyline as they started to rise above the rooftops.  In the distance, the buildings were tilting off-kilter, each one at a different angle and orientation than the next.  Rather more like the fabric of reality itself was starting to twist and tear --  
  
 _great ragged gaps in the landscape, looking almost like someone had forgotten to render it, and so inhuman that the mind screamed and fled from even trying to make anything of where reality had bluescreened_  
  
\-- than like the ground was actually shifting, as it would in an earthquake or similar event.  
  
"Enemy incoming!" Oracle suddenly yelled.  "It's pretty dangerous!"  
  
"Dammit, Skull!"  
  
"I didn't jinx us!  I did _not_ jinx us!"  
  
Red shadows bubbled up from a spot in mid-air above their heads, burst into a golden, cubist robot of an angel, and then collapsed into an actual living angel.  Sort of living.  It looked organic and human enough, at least, inside its pink armor and white-and-gold talbard.  
  
"Absconding from your cells is forbidden," it proclaimed in a deep, slightly electronic voice.  "Return to your prison posthaste.  Those who wish to disturb society shall be slain on the very spot they stand."  
  
"You're the one who's disturbing it!" Panther yelled.  
  
"Dissenters must be destroyed."  
  
 _Exterminate_ , Goro thought wildly, and plunged into the fight.  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
After finally destroying the archangel -- and its seemingly endless summons angels, which just kept healing the damned thing -- the low din of the crowd far below shifted.  
  
Goro followed the team to peer over the edge of the platform.  Several stories below, the movement of the crowd had turned ugly, ants scurrying to and fro in a very obvious panic.  The sidewalks darkened with the press of people as they skittered away from the bone spires and debris.  In the streets, traffic had come to a halt, all horns and screeching tires; people fled some cars in a visibly mindless panic, other people leapt into others as though hoping the interior would be safer than outside.  
  
"It seems they've finally realized their lives are in danger," Fox said.  
  
"Took 'em long enough!" Skull added.  
  
Queen held her arms close, almost hugging herself.  "I can't believe they didn't notice until the danger was so close to them...."  
  
"Things are going to get even worse from here on out," Mona warned.  "The entire city has stopped functioning."  He cast a lingering, worried glance down below.  "At least they can still panic... for now."  
  
Panther shook her head fiercely.  "If people still don't act for themselves after seeing all this..." she growled.  "I'm sorry, but they're hopeless!"  
  
But... what were those people supposed to _do?_ Goro wondered.  
  
The thieves pressed on.  After that first angel, they began encountering guards.  More angels -- lesser ones -- and some demons, and... penis monsters.  
  
Goro cast Akira a despairing look, after one fight with a penis monster that had just kept summoning and re-summoning wobbly lumps of gelatinous, far-too-phallic creatures that had a splattering of pale... _something_ , Goro did not want to know what... on their tips.  Tops.  
  
No luck.  Akira had his best non-expression of stifled laughter on, and merely raised an unreadable eyebrow at Goro.  
  
They pressed on.  
  
The second archangel wore purple and white, and had yellow-blond hair so straight and tall it squared off his head.  He barely spoke, and was somewhat easier to put down since he didn't summon lesser angels to heal him.  
  
Akira kept looking over the side, letting Goro drag him along like a balloon whenever Goro got close enough to the edge as they continued onwards.  After about three more fights, Goro stepped up next to him, carefully not looking at anything but the path ahead.  "What is it?"  
  
"... They're starting to disappear," Akira answered.  "Into black fog.  Like we did."  
  
Goro blinked, startled, then followed Akira's gaze.  It didn't seem to have changed much from before-- wait.  No.  If you didn't look for individuals, but at the general shape and density of the crowd, you could see tiny gaps seem to open up as pixels -- people, but they looked like pixels at this distance -- blipped dark and then light.  Black fog, then nothingness right down to the sidewalk, and people jerking away so the pale speckles flared noticeably.  
  
People were dying.  
  
And Goro didn't think they could be caught by the Velvet Room.  Not without Personae, or a bond with Akira to get them there.  
  
The third archangel was a woman, with faintly green skin and a brass flower in her off hand.  "Hold," she proclaimed, sickly-sweet.  "I have not the intention of fighting you, children of man."  Something went very still and tense in the pit of Goro's stomach.  He knew this kind of voice.  He _knew_ it.  "Return from whence you came," she continued, electronic and dangerously gentle.  "Proceeding further shall only serve to shorten your lives.  I advise you not as a guardian, but out of the mercy of my heart."  
  
 _I'm doing this for your own good, dear._  
  
"Ah... greet me with weapons in hand?" it cooed, as if it didn't have a sword of its own bared and ready.  "Me seemeth I have no choice..."  
  
 _This will hurt me more than it does you._  
  
"I shall take personal responsibility for the misconduct of my children!"  
  
And it was lies, it was always _lies_.  
  
He could still hear the screaming, faint and distant far below, as he cast magic, as he summoned Personae, the scent of blood thick in his throat.  The Shadow hit sharp and cutting; Goro parried with a strike and let the thump of recoil steal the pained gasps from his lungs.  His teammates shrieked, more spells, more pain, more blood--  
  
 _Mommy... mommy--!  Stop, I'm sorry, mommy_ help _\--!_  
  
\-- tiny mews of pain, the cat, the _cat_ , but no because it was keeping Goro awake, one of the younger kids who hadn't yet figured out to potty as often as possible, wetting the bed got you hit --   
  
It was the _cat_ , dammit, he was not six years old anymore!  
  
After the Shadow fizzled away, Goro summoned Akira and fullhealed the cat.  It probably wasn't necessary -- certainly not with the Diarahan Akira had now, Mona wasn't that poorly off -- but.  
  
But.  
  
Those tiny mewled yelps.  
  
And the panic echoing faintly from far below.  
  
Goro clasped his shaking hands together, and paced slowly over to the edge of the platform.  The crowd milled below, almost invisible in the gloom, tiny pixels of movement and distant screaming.  
  
He felt so cold.  
  
"'This city is afraid of me'," he whispered to himself.  "'I have seen its true face.'"  He felt more than saw Akira hovering closer, the constant stream of chains just a flicker of motion in the corners of his vision.  "'The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"'"  One gloved hand came to rest lightly upon Goro's shoulder. "'... and I'll look down and whisper...'"  
  
He lifted his head to meet Akira's eyes, gray and black wavering through a thick sheen of tears.  
  
The people below.  They weren't just Adults.  Not faceless oblivious zombies, or Shadow-dolls, some indifferent tide of cruelty that could only sweep everything up in its path...  They were just people.  Just... scared people, as frightened and confused in the face of inexplicable horror as the other children in the orphanage had been.  
  
As he had been.  
  
"... 'Yes.'"  The quote had ended with 'no'.  Goro turned, both hands clutching Akira's one.  "Akira."  He couldn't see any more past the tears turning everything to red motion and light, squeezing free to trail hot and wet across the corners of his smile.  They were all just _people_.  " _Shrive_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- uuuugh cheating, uuuugh copying so much dialogue...  
> \- quote at end is Rorschach from Watchmen


	11. Chapter 11

  
Guan Yin repelled _everything_.  As if to compensate, she only had three spells, though: Salvation, Samarecarm, and a unique skill called 'Spider's Thread', which seemed to be Salvation with a bonus Makarakarn.  It guzzled SP like the proverbial fish, but having the extra time (both under protection, and to throw a hit) could be a lifesaver.  
  
"That," Skull proclaimed, ruining the moment, "is still _super fucked up_."  
  
"It didn't hurt," Goro murmured, stunned, one hand against his chest.  He'd still felt it, yes, but... it hadn't _hurt_.  Just as Igor and Lavenza had sworn.  He was... finally using the spell correctly.  
  
Or... no.  ' _Catharsis may be difficult_ ,' Igor had said... and the spell had felt different every time.  Improving.  It'd hurt worst with Fantome's rage, less so with Huntsman's refusal to kill, barely stung with Quasimodo's wish to help... and then done an abrupt 180 with Judas, when Goro burned with very nearly the same bitterness of Fantome, the pain of betrayal...  
  
Fantome had been rejected by the world.  Judas had been used by people he cared for.  Adrestia... Adrestia had barely stung, but she'd also been about betrayal and being used... but she hadn't hated for it.  She wanted to mete out just retribution, true retribution, single-targeted and for the sake of more people than himself...  
  
The spell wanted him to want to help people...?  
  
No.  
  
The spell was a catharsis.  The pain wasn't about other people, it was about what kind of emotion was being lanced.  How much of it was hatred.  How much of it wanted to hurt something, _anything_ , in Goro's pain.  
  
Guan Yin... didn't hate.  
  
The people below were just people.  
  
They didn't deserve to die because the Grail wanted them to -- Goro had already understood that much -- but they also deserved to be _actively saved._   Just because they were people, and alive, without any other qualifications.  
  
Goro called Akira back up and turned to the party.  "Let's go."  
  
It didn't take long for Oracle to yelp.  "We've got another one of those angel things coming up!  It's right past this stair and the reading is off the charts!"  
  
The thing was a dull red and carried a spear rather than a sword, but otherwise was just another Shadow with the same supercilious look on its face and electronic note to its voice as the previous three.  
  
"How unexpected," it said flatly.  "To think you would slay every archangel that arrived before me..."  
  
Why did they even let these things talk.  They should just all hurl spellfire at it and plow through.  Though then that led to the problem of, say, Panther and Fox accidentally cancelling each other out... or would they do extra painful damage from the temperature differentials?  
  
"So," the angel said.  "You commit any degree of sacrilege for your 'justice'--"  
  
"Sacrilege?" Goro echoed over the angel's blathering.  "You have _no concept of_ \-- you--"  How dare that thing accuse anybody but Goro of committing sacrilege for some perverse, twisted justice!  
  
Akira tagged Panther, Morgana, and Haru to the front lines, and vanished in a crackling of fire like wicked laughter and Goro's yell of " _Huntsman!_ "  
  
This one summoned healing angel minions as well.  Bastard.  But, once he was down the platform changed subtly, like a great beast turning over in its sleep to reveal the white-lipped maw of a teleport space.  
  
A quick return to the ground got them a fullheal from Lavenza, who then beamed with proud delight at Goro.  "You've grown!" she said.  "My master will be so pleased!"  
  
"I feel like I understand everyone a little better now," Goro replied, rubbing the back of his head.  Now why did that phrase sound familiar...?  "And maybe you two, as well.  You want to help protect humanity... just because you want to help protect humanity.  Right?"  
  
Her eyes brightened, misting up.  "Oh... when I tell my master we haven't fully failed you... yes."  She scrubbed one little hand across her eyes.  "Yes, that's exactly what we are.  We believe in humanity... and now, Goro Akechi, I can see that you do, too."  
  
"Let's go already!" Skull shouted from near the bone-path's base.  
  
Goro hesitated, then set one hand on Lavenza's head.  Her hair was preternaturally soft, and faintly sticky to the touch like corn silk.  "Be safe, Lavenza."  
  
She nodded.  "Do your best, Goro.  Trust in your newfound understanding-- you can win against this beast."  Then, softer, more heartfelt.  "We believe in you."  
  
  
-0-0-0  
  
  
The bridge to the shrine was made of four massive cubes of stark black Depths-basalt, red geometric designs cut carelessly through, and then the interior of the shrine itself was floored in more of the Depths-basalt, no longer violet in the light blazing from the stacked prison cells.  These cells were different from the shrine in the Depths, though: many of the people inside were shouting questions over each other, while others were crying.  The sound was faint, muted by the oppressive atmosphere that blurred the captives' silhouettes against the light, but it was _there_.  
  
At the center, the false Igor unfurled in a swirl of blood and shadows, his hands spread in false benevolence... until his bulging, bloodshot eyes landed on Goro, and his fingers curled like talons.  
  
"My traitorous champion,"  he hissed, in a voice so distorted it was no longer recognizable as the Grail's.  "I see you have not yet come to your senses.  You would defy the people's will even now?  Tear away their hopes and dreams even as the world labors to deliver them?"  
  
Well, that was some sick excuse for the hell rain and rotting bones, and almost certainly a twisted lie to boot.  "What can I say." Goro smirked, even though his own fingers itched to claw the beast's face off.  "I've been defying the people's will since long before I discovered these powers."  
  
It growled at that.  "Your ingratitude shall be your undoing."  
  
His ingratitude...?  Ah.  "Hm, yes, I've been informed that you gave me the app.  Such a shame you didn't step forward to guide me through any of the abilities or dangers of this world," Goro managed to say mildly.  "It's almost as if it doesn't count if I'm not free to make my own choices, for good or ill.  And, ill as your rigged result was... I still succeeded."  
  
"... You did nothing of the sort."  
  
"I wanted to ruin the man responsible for the terrible circumstances of my life."  Goro couldn't speak fast enough to follow his own train of thought... so he fell back on his entrained media cadence, precise and clear even as his mind linked up concepts he hadn't had time to consider on the way up.  "I wanted power, and acceptance... and to save myself from the fate laid out for me.  I wanted to defy the society that wished nothing more than for me to die quietly in obscurity, so that they could pretend men always wed and bastards didn't exist, that their scorn couldn't drive a woman to suicide.  _And I did_."  He'd won.  Even as hollow as it was, the child he'd been when a mysterious red-eyed app appeared on his secondhand phone late one night... that child would've been celebrating.  "Shido sits imprisoned, suffocating under the weight of his own guilt with his crimes known.  I'm alive, and famed, and accepted!"  He couldn't be the beast's champion.  He _couldn't._   Everything he was ran counter to the creature's goals.  "I made my own choices _freely_ , and defied my fate in exactly the way you can't let anyone want to do!"  
  
"The happiness of the populace rests in my regulation," the cup said smugly as if it hadn't been listening, raising its voice to echo over the rising discontented rumbles of the inmates.  
  
"Bullshit!" Skull yelled.  "Look what you did to Crow!  And to Joker and the rest of us!"  
  
"Those who cannot understand must be eliminated."  Goro readied for a hit, in case the Grail remembered to do so instead of monologue.  But it continued.  "The masses that praise the Holy Grail are infinite.  Their desires and power in turn grant me immortality."  
  
" _That's_ your endgame!" Goro shouted in sudden realization.  _That_ rang true in a way that nothing else the beast had said did.  "Your motive in this horrific game of yours isn't boredom!  It's _immortality_.  It's about promising people their dreams come true so you can drain their lives!"  
  
Shouts of outrage and horror echoed around the chamber.  People started hammering on the bars of their cages... and the veins to the cup crumbled to ash.  
  
"Hm...?"  The contents of the cup pulsed once, testingly, with a faint reddish glow.  "I am no longer recieving the strength of the inmates!  You _repugnant rebels!_ "  The golden chains holding the cup to the floor burst in a shower of bright shrapnel, and light shot in blood-tinged pillars out of the floor, taking the black coating with it.  What was left was pristine, polished marble, white and golden brown radiating from the cup's base, kanji inlaid in the white stone.  
  
Then... nothing.  
  
After a long moment, Goro peered out from behind his arms, thrown up protectively and instinctively before his face.  Nothing.  No sound.  No more falling shrapnel.  No strange light -- the pillars had been there and gone in an instant.  
  
No more cells.  
  
The walls had changed to blocks of brown marble, incised faintly with the same Depths-of-Mementos floor patterns and jutting in uneven but symmetrical shapes around the room.  Whether they'd been dragged up by the blood-tinged light, or the cells had simply... been replaced, and taken the people with them... or, worse, _not_ taken the people with them... Goro couldn't tell.  
  
"Hey..." Skull said.  "We... did get him... yeah?"  
  
Surely... surely not that easily, just by cutting off his... was it life support?  Was the beast only alive like some terrible cognitive version of an ICU patient, unable to survive of its own accord...?  
  
"It's silent," Oracle murmured uncertainly, "but... I dunno..."  
  
The wall stones blazed with teal light between their cracks, then flared red, so brightly the very air seemed soaked in blood.  The shrine began to rumble and shake, nearly throwing Goro off his feet... and the cup...  
  
Its gears were turning, grinding nearly unaudible alongside the rumble of everything else.  The feathery designs of the bowl were slowly beginning to turn as well, independent of the base.  
  
Skull shouted something that Goro could barely hear, even as the walls collapsed.  Goro flinched away from the sudden bright sun, arm up to block it, but even through watering eyes, he could see the cup's gears strain.  Deform.  Burst, under the pressure of unfurling metal wings, and there was something silvery and dark in the shadow beneath...  
  
The floor pulled away from the cup in great, tapering slices, knocking Goro and the others to their knees.  (He couldn't see blood, couldn't see gore, on the crumbling stone of the walls... couldn't see cell bars or people... couldn't hear, but he wouldn't be able to hear their screams as they plummeted, if there'd still been people trapped in the walls.)  
  
The cup... the remains of the cup... were rising.  Being pushed up by something broad and silvery-dark that'd been hidden below the floor.  The upraised hands that Goro had thought mere statues, an expression of the beast's claim that humanity beseeched his mercy... weren't.  They tilted to either side on angular steel pillars, the tapering forearms of a postmodern sculpture of man, hovering above the ponderous pocketknife spread of four sets of wings.  Brass, silver, gold, and black-enameled red, each sharper and more ominous than the last, rose behind two sets of steel honeycomb, eight cases in all and far too easily reached by the golden idol hands.  
  
The beast looked like some mecha-angel inspired art piece of god.  The cup itself, the two-story giant they'd thought so difficult to even scratch... that had been just the mask encasing its tiny head, the facade now floating high in the sky as a golden halo-crown of wings and hubris.  
  
They'd barely touched the creature at all.  
  
"I," it thundered, echoing over itself in a multitude of its own electronic voice, "am the administrator born of the collective human unconscious.  The god of control, Yaldabaoth."  
  
"This is crazy!" Oracle yelped.  "It's like a building!"  
  
"He would never meet code."  
  
"Now is _not the time to be funny_ , Goro!"  
  
They could barely understand Yaldabaoth's horrible voice.  "The administrator must guide mankind toward proper development."  But he'd done nothing-- he'd actively done the exact opposite!  If he wanted proper development he should've given Akira the app and the cat, _not Goro!_ "And now that the foolishness of man has been proven, it is the administrator's duty," it purred, "to purge them."  
  
"You kidding?!" Skull shouted.  "This is just some kinda rigged game you started!"  
  
"The foolish masses merely spread indolent thoughts and force the progress of society backward."  
  
This fucking-- stupid-- "You can't _have_ a society without the masses!" Goro yelled.  "You disgusting eugenicist!"  
  
He may as well have not spoken at all, as Yaldabaoth continued, "If left to humanity, the world would slowly meet its demise.  Rehabilitation is impossible now."  
  
"That doesn't mean humans are evil though!" Queen yelled.  
  
"Indeed.  There are many upstanding citizens." Wait, what?  "However, they merely take the sole path before them.  The act of making decisions is accompanied by nothing but pain.  Even if a cliff of ruin lie ahead, these lemmings would march on without a second thought."  
  
That wasn't even _true_.  Filmmakers had chased the damn things off a cliff _on purpose_ as little more than mid-20th-century _clickbait_.  
  
"Bullshit!  You're just forcin' your selfish ideas on people!"  
  
"For a god," Oracle added, "you're pretty damn prejudiced!"  
  
"I am the entity which governs this world."  No it wasn't.  "Its future depends wholly on my leadership."  No it didn't.  "Those who dare defy this natural order shall be met with punishment raining down from the heavens."  And it fired a blast of wind -- not Garu, just plain ocean-and-blood-scented air -- that tried to knock everybody off the platform.  
  
Screw this.  "Let's do this.  _Adrestia!_ "  
  
Their hits didn't do very much.  A few dings, some red-hot spots that could just be the gleam of the late afternoon sun on the beast's carapace.  It was like they were little more than ants to Yaldabaoth.  
  
Well then.  They'd just have to be fire ants.  Goro had Akira, and Guan Yin, and they all carried healing items, and they already outnumbered it... they'd just have to outlast it.  
  
"I release upon you the deadly sin of lust!" Yaldabaoth proclaimed, much to Goro's revulsion.  "You have no means of escape, humans.  The insanity of mankind shall bring forth its demise..."  
  
A needle-tipped, robotic brass crane arm spidered out from behind the beast's wings, and dipped into the golden-glowing head of the leftmost honeycomb drum.  Goro had _known_ those things would be bad news.  It pulled out a brass gun, which rotated overdramatically.  
  
"It grew an arm?!" Mona yelped.  "And it has a gun?!"  
  
It fired.  A swarm of shadows and blood converged on Skull and swarmed him.  
  
"Skull!" Panther shouted.  
  
"I'm okay!"  He was hunched over, breathing hard and clutching an arm over his stomach.  "Shit.  Feels like finding my first nudie mag."  ("TMI, Skull!" Oracle snapped.)  "That fucking idiot."  He managed to straighten a little, and shook a fist at Yaldabaoth.  "You hear me, Yaldy?!  You're a moron!"  
  
Skull missed a chance to take a shot a couple of minutes later, though.  No one was untactful enough to yell at him for it.  
  
Then, "I release upon you the deadly sin of vanity!  You have no means of escape, humans.  The fraudulence of mankind shall bring forth ruin."  
  
"You gotta lotta nerve talking about frauds," Skull yelled, as a second needle-tipped crane dipped into the rightmost honeycomb.  "You lying cheating rigged-game fake-mentor bastard!"  
  
Yaldabaoth rang the bell that it extracted, and Adrestia shrieked in rage.  Goro felt the whirl of her elements flicker past in a rainbow of tatters: she'd weakened to everything.  
  
"Guan Yin!"  If he'd take every kind of hit harder, he might as well switch to healing and support.  
  
A couple of minutes later, Yaldabaoth went for gluttony, with the exact same spiel.  Somehow, instead of trying to sweep them off the building with the sword it drew -- either with the flat, or the edge that would've been as deadly as being hit by a car -- it merely brandished it threateningly, and a great wave of exhaustion hit.  
  
"Gluttony!" Oracle yelled.  "It doubled your skill cost!"  
  
Wrath, and Yaldabaoth's book hit Noir with rage.  She ignored all sense of technique and emptied her grenade launcher at the beast and its spell objects; the beast simply pulled the objects back out when one was destroyed, unfazed.  Though at least it was stupid enough -- and they were strong enough -- that they could keep the number out down to one or two at a time.  
  
Greed made Goro's stomach clench, tight and near-nauseated with pain.  _Skull's right, this creature is stupid.  Casting things on people who know how to function through them..._  
  
And then it hit Noir with envy.  
  
"Akira!" Goro yelled in a panic, backpedaling out of range of her axe even as Akira caught her, pinning her arms to her sides.  She struggled, screeching and hissing, and Goro retreated with her to the back line.  Fox and Mona took their places.  
  
Pride bounced Mona's next hit back onto the cat in a blaze of fire.  
  
And then the beast wised up and resummoned all four objects at once.  "The abyss of the unconscious yearns for ultimate ruin.  You have no means of escape, humans."  ("Shut up, we get it already, you repetitive freak!" Panther yelled.)  "Punishment shall strike you all... as you pass through the gates of destruction."  
  
The objects' attachment points blazed red, and shot out beams of dark power, crossing to form a spherical nexus crackling with thin red lightning.  Taking out the bell and sword did nothing, and a couple of minutes later... it went off in a world-shaking blast of blood and fire and shadow.  
  
They withstood it.  Barely.  With Noir dazed and her ailment shaken loose, Goro was able to switch out Akira for Guan Yin, and he stepped forward to heal the team.  
  
A couple more hits took out the book and gun, and this time, Yaldabaoth reeled.  
  
"Fools opposing a god!" Yaldabaoth roared.  "So... this is the power that resists ruin!"  It must've been dazed, because it promptly contradicted itself.  "My control shall not bow down to ruin!  My control is the _ultimate truth of this world!_ "  It fired a second blast of the blood-fire-shadow, no preliminary charge to give them a warning to brace themselves, and Goro was knocked to the shaking platform with the rest of the team.  
  
The rest of the team... except for the cat.  "If you're really a god, you should be guiding humans to your ideals!" Mona shouted.  "You're destroying them because you can't do that, aren't you?  So that you can flaunt your own existence.  That's why you were observing us!  You had to because the reaction of the 'masses' worried you!"  
  
It had to destroy humanity because humanity wasn't orderly.  It wasn't subservient.  It didn't cater to the beast... didn't know about it, didn't care about it, wouldn't care about its rules and demands.  Humanity wouldn't become fuel for its existence.  
  
"You find people like that everywhere," Panther said scornfully.  
  
"What drivel," Yaldabaoth scoffed.  Its crown whirled into high speed, wind screaming in its wings, and an even larger shadowy blast darkened the sky.  
  
The brightest thing left in the world was the cat, staring despairingly up at the beast.  
  
"Since you've been forsaken by the world, there is nowhere that you can belong," the beast said, blasting them with lightning.  It laughed at their struggles, as they fought their own nervous systems to push themselves back up, and shot lightning at them again.  "Not even one sliver of unpredictability can be permitted under my control.  Do you hear the voices of the masses?"  Goro couldn't.  His ears rang with the successive blasts, his own racing and unsteady heartbeat, the crackling buzz of lingering electricity in the fine hairs there.  "They mock you for revolting against a god.  Humans are naught but clumps of desire.  Logic dictates that a world filled with them will decline.  The sin of rebelling against a god is severe.  As punishment, you shall taste pain everlasting."  
  
All Goro could taste was copper and salt.  Steel.  Fire.  
  
Coffee, faintly.  
  
"The attendant created from the dregs of human hope, hm...?  It is impossible for a petty existence like you to overrule my precedent!"  
  
"Petty existence..." Goro coughed.  He spat blood onto the cracked marble, slowly pushing himself up against the twitching of his muscles, the phantom touch of hands under his arms, his palm, against his back.  "Petty... but not perverse."  
  
"I am god!"  
  
"You are a perversion."  Goro swayed, but steadied himself on shaking legs, taking his balance from the press of a nonexistent body against his back.  "No... not just a perversion.  You are an _inversion_ of everything humanity is."  Order... stagnation... death.  "The one thing humanity does is survive."  
  
Plunged into hell, and there were still enough people even at ground zero for Yaldabaoth to try to discourage Goro and his team with their voices.  That he could... that he _had to_ , when he was the size of a skyscraper and could squash them all flat if he had any understanding of the team... of how they would not surrender...   
  
"The one thing we do, that nothing else does... is live in the face of knowing our own mortality." Just seven children, seven out of the millions in Japan alone, the billions of the entire world, and not _one_ of them faltered... having a Persona could only explain so much.  Unseen arms curled around his shoulders, the scent of coffee and curry drowning out the beast's blood, the half-numb buzz of electricity warming with each throbbing heartbeat, thickening, strengthening... surging into his heart and throat.  "We are creation, and chaos, and change.  We cannot be destroyed.  We cannot be conquered.  _We cannot submit.  You will not win_."  
  
"Human hope is a desire too!" Mona shouted, distant past the thrum of power.  "You better not underestimate it!  The Phantom Thieves will yield to no one, no matter who they are!  Even if only one of us remains, we'll get back up and fight to the very end.  And we'll definitely... definitely...!  Take the world!"  
  
Yaldabaoth's darkness thinned, the churning clouds becoming visible once more.  Or perhaps that was the haze of silver-tinged-gold creeping into the edges of Goro's vision.  
  
"You hear that?!" the cat's voice sounded so far away, high and triumphant.  "Those are the voices of the humans you made fun of!  No one wants you to rule over them!"  
  
" _God is the one who creates the world!_ "  Yaldabaoth was not a god.  Surely no god would sound so small.  
  
"Hey, _god_."  Skull too?  Mocking and far past the silver and gold.  "Foolish humans are prayin' down there.  They're prayin' there's no place for someone like you in this world!"  
  
There wasn't.  
  
 _Stagnation is unnatural._  
  
 _And the unnatural... is impossible..._  
  
"You picked the wrong toys," Goro thought he said, or perhaps he didn't, voice or power rasping in his thrumming lungs.  A breath tickled the hair away from the nape of his neck: the press of lips there put the word in his throat.  " _Shrive_."  
  
The world roared into blue fire.  Akira's arms around him.  Akira against his back.  Akira's lips against Goro's nape.  Black chains rattled in a blur through Goro's hands.  
  
He squeezed.  
  
They tore harmlessly through his grip, caught, and snapped.  
  
Akira's warmth vanished. Goro didn't hear the explosion, could barely see Yaldabaoth past the streaked afterimages, didn't care: Akira's presence was curled up in his heart, all fierce laughter and joy.  Yaldabaoth said something: it was irrelevant.  Shrive.  _Shrive_.  The last resort-- a Shrive without a weapon, a Shrive made with  
  
\- _love_ -  
  
 _I am thou,_ a voice murmured, so beautiful that it instantly blocked itself from Goro's memory, leaving only the words.  _But only for a time._  
  
His new Persona was... straight up.  
  
Goro looked, up to where the storm clouds were circling... up to the flashes of heat lightning and faint rainbows.  Something deep in the mists was glowing silver.  
  
One dark, shapely foot appeared.  Gold and silver rings glinted on bare toes; bells on a matching anklet chimed, deep as church bells.  A sari like the night sky trailed nebulae in every color, wrapped loosely around the Persona's lush form and a blouse all pale mist and rainbows.  Silver gleamed in intricate henna patterns on her hands... and her second pair, and her third, and her fourth, each spread higher than the last.  Her long hair lay loose in curls and waves as wild and dark as Akira's, studded throughout with white lotus blossoms that looked like stars.  The bindi on her brow was a true star, burning brightly; and when she opened her eyes, set in a face as lovely as her voice, they glowed silver moons edged with gold.  
  
One lotus fell from the very tip of a curl, and it dissipated into firefly motes that sank into Goro's body -- and the rest of the teams' -- with the telltale relief of a fullheal.  
  
"Fools!" But Yaldabaoth's horrific voice almost held a note of panic, and he threw another blast of black fire and shadows... that felt like nothing.  "Impossible!"  
  
 _Nothing is impossible._   The Persona's voice left words echoing in Goro's head.  _Except stagnation_.  
  
One spell.  
  
Goro lifted his hand.  "Shakti," he murmured, and it rumbled across the world like a thunderclap.  He reached out, her foremost right hand following as she leaned over them, stars and rainbows high above their heads.  One silver-painted hand pressed its palm to Yaldabaoth's face, and Goro clenched their fingers around its head.  The idol hands and crane arms scrabbled at Shakti's bare arm, as ineffective as air.  
  
One spell.  The surge of a river in flood, and the dam would not withstand it.  
  
" _Overthrow_."  
  
The flood burst through, and the beast began to laugh.  
  
Distantly, Oracle screeched.  " _You're healing it?!_ "  
  
"No."  And then Goro couldn't hear past the rush of power.  Full HP.  Full HP.  Full HP.  Over and over and over, endless power sinking into the beast... until it stopped laughing.  Until it tried to pull away.  Until it began to struggle once more, six arms flailing uselessly, four sets of wings flapping, metal screeching.  
  
Straining.  
  
Cracking.  
  
Light poured in prismatic rays from each crack in Yaldabaoth's metal carapace, brighter and brighter, the edges melting and the beast screaming... then struggling in silence, its voice burned out.  
  
And the flood kept coming.  Endless.  Eternal.  
  
 _Hardly eternal, child_ , Shakti chuckled.  
  
The cracks expanded.  The light burned.  Metal disintegrated.  Goro's palm felt sunburnt; his eyes could see nothing but white anymore.  His face hurt where his mask didn't cover it.  He couldn't hear.  
  
He couldn't hear.  
  
Until... true silence returned.  The river cut into another channel and vanished, leaving Goro reeling.  
  
His eyes had forgotten what black looked like.  It ached, making his head spin as black tried to look gray, then fuzzy, then reeled through several non-colors before trying to be a fuzzy gray again.  
  
Another lotus-blossom fullheal let shapes start forming again, then the eerie quiet of a gentle breeze -- ocean and rain and strawberry shampoo --  
  
Goro's nose was buried in long hair.  Orange.  And.  Blonde?  
  
The sun was starting to set behind gold-tinged clouds.  
  
He had his arms over living bodies.  His weight.  Was being held up by at least three people.  
  
Futaba.  Ann.  A... red... cravat, that was Ryuji.  
  
"Nn...?" Goro's voice rasped in his throat.  
  
"You're okay!" Futaba said.  "Are you?  Don't ever do that again!  That Persona's power levels were crazy!  What even was she?!"  
  
Goro had no idea.  To either question.  "... I... can see.  And hear."  
  
" _You mean you couldn't before?!_ "  
  
"Worth it."  They'd.  He'd.  Destroyed Yaldabaoth.  Nothing could've withstood that much raw energy being dumped straight into it.  With no outlet.  Goro had been a very small conduit and felt like... like... he'd been held open much larger to let the flow through.  And then kindly restored.  
  
Shakti was a Persona... no, a personification of the entirety of creation... not just the human bit, Goro felt.  He very well might've been restored.  Without needing to cast a spell for it.  
  
Goro managed to lift his head out of his sister's hair, and look for his team.  They mostly looked dazed, but... if they hadn't hit the ground to take cover, Shakti had probably restored them too.  
  
... He didn't see the cat.  
  
He shifted enough that Ryuji shuffled him around in the direction he wanted, and there, at the end of the platform, he found the cat.  Morgana stood next to an actual, hovering, cup-sized brass cup, one little paw resting on it.  
  
"Hey, Mona!  He's okay!"  
  
Morgana turned around, met Goro's eyes, and smiled when they focused on him.  Then, he glanced at the rest of the group, and his smile gentled.  "Thanks for everything, gang."  
  
That sounded like... oh.  "It's time to go home, isn't it?" Goro asked.  
  
Morgana nodded.  "This place will soon disappear..."  He picked up the cup, and let his gaze drop to it.  "Humans have the power to change the world.  They just forgot about that for a bit..."  The cup glowed, brighter and brighter, and gently whited out the world.  
  
When it returned, they were all standing in Shibuya.  The people were frozen, as if time had stopped, but... not as if it had stopped during the despair and panic while they'd been fighting their way to the shrine.  It looked as if it had stopped before that, during a perfectly ordinary day -- no one afraid, no one aware of the spines over their heads or the blood rain trickling to a stop.  
  
The public wasn't going to remember this, Goro realized, as the sun came out in full and the lingering blood and bones dissolved into pink dust and shards like cherry petals.  As the world itself started to fade, all pale pink outlines and light.  Everything except themselves.  
  
Including the cat.  
  
"The whole world is a product of cognition," Morgana said softly,  glowing and fading.  "Not just the Metaverse.  It can be freely re-made."  
  
Goro's heart stopped.  
  
"The same goes for you, and everyone else," Morgana began, and Goro lurched free of Ryuji and Futaba's grips.  
  
"We're still cognitive?!" he gasped, catching himself on his knees before he grabbed the cat.  
  
Morgana blinked, shaken out of his beatific expression.  "... Yes...?  Soon a new world will come..."  
  
There was no time.  
  
Goro reached, "Akira!", and Akira blazed into being before him.  "I need your knife!"  Goro grabbed for it even as he spoke, and got the dagger loose and against his chest before Akira could react.  " _Shrive!_ " and he shoved the blade home.  
  
All his Personae burned, awake at his urgency.  Loki, to rage against an unjust world, to break the chains of destiny.  Robin Hood, a hero for the downtrodden.  Le Fantôme, reviled through no fault of his own.  Huntsman, ready to decieve for justice.  Quasimodo, who just wanted to help.  Judas, used to cast the people into despair.  Eleos, a sanctuary for those who needed a listening ear.  Adrestia, true justice and rightful retribution.  Guan Yin, that deep compassion to help the world.  
  
Shakti.    
  
 _Please.  His soul is still here, every facet of my living heart that matches his, and a world where existence is still cognitive._.. please.   
  
Silver-henna'd hands cupped his own and lifted them, pulling the blade from his chest, into the air where it disintegrated.  
  
 _Please_.  
  
The particles gathered shadow and pink light to themselves, quickly forming the outline of a boy.  Akira's hair.  Akira's face.  Akira's eyes, opening all-gray in a solidifying face, wide and startled.  
  
The world flared white.  
  
Something landed heavy on Goro's head.  Something else landed heavy in his arms, and he didn't need the scent of coffee and curry or the overjoyed shrieks from the rest of the team to know.  
  
It was Akira.  
  
The thing on Goro's head started struggling and yowling.  "You ruined my dramatic exit!" Morgana complained, even as the entire team crashed into them for a group hug.  
  
Akira was in his arms.  Alive and breathing.  
  
He couldn't even really care about the cat on his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I didn't get to mention, but I'm picturing Guan Yin looking like Lala-chan in white because I can. Also bc literally no one else in Goro's life has treated him with compassion and kindness, no-strings-attached.  
> \- copying everythiiiiiiing, blah. NEVER AGAIN.  
> \- the caged people in the shrine are different, less supportive of the Grail, from the very start because they're actual people -- I'm figuring the ones who evaporated in the hellscape while we were climbing from Shibuya -- and they're all "wtf hellscape oh noes what is going on what is this thing"  
> \- "a cat on his head" is a Japanese colloquialism for innocence

**Author's Note:**

> \- some of Le Fantome's dialogue cribbed from Andrew Lloyd Webber  
> \- shrive: to administer the sacrament of reconcilation to; to free from guilt; to confess one's sins, especially to a priest


End file.
